External usb hdd WD Elements - avoid spindown

Update: I got a new workaound here: External usb hdd WD Elements - avoid spindown -- #2

I've got an external 2.5", 500G USB HDD from WesternDigital
- this one: http://images.google.com/images?q=WDBABV5000ABK-00.
Without being accessed, it spins down after 5-10s (seconds, not minutes!) automatically.
This behavior seems to be hardcoded in the hardware/firmware by WD and cannot be changed (if anyone knows better, please leave a comment). It can be very annoying, for example when starting a file manager or open a 'save as...'-dialog etc. because the hard drive has to spin up every time adding a delay of some seconds until the dialog appears. The same happens when reading or writing at a low speed (let's say ~ <10KiBytes/s) - the drive spins up and down multiple times a minute.

A dirty workaround is to keep the drive busy by touching and syncing in a short interval.

A quick way to do this via commandline:

while [ 1 ]; do echo "touch at - `date`"; touch /media/WD_500G_NTFS/tempfile; sleep 5s; sync; done

A bit nicer with the following script:

	#!/bin/sh
	# this script finds out the mountpoint for the given DISKLABEL
	# and touches the file ${MOUNTPOINT}/tempfile periodically every
	# INTERVAL.
	# adjust the following two values.
	DISKLABEL="WD_500G_NTFS"
	INTERVAL="5s"
	# get line with our disklabel
	MOUNTLINE=$(mount -l | grep "$DISKLABEL");
	# check if mounted
	if [ "$MOUNTLINE" == "" ]
	then
	echo "Error: Partition with disklabel $DISKLABEL not mounted."
	exit 1
	fi
	# get mountpoint
	# FIXME:
	# not sure if awk command always returns
	# the correct mountpoint or an empty string...
	MOUNTPOINT=$(echo $MOUNTLINE | awk '{ print $3 }')
	# check if mountpoint begins with /media/ to prevent errors by
	# mountpoint extraction above.
	# dirty. problem when partition is mounted somewhere else.. :-(
	(echo $MOUNTPOINT | grep "\/media\/") &> /dev/null; RC=$?
	if ! [ "$RC" = 0 ]
	then
	echo "Error: problem extracting mountpoint."
	exit 2
	fi
	echo "Found mountpoint for partition labeled '$DISKLABEL' at '$MOUNTPOINT'."
	echo "Touching and syncing ${MOUNTPOINT}/tempfile every ${INTERVAL}..."
	echo "Quit with ^C."
	while true
	do
	touch ${MOUNTPOINT}/tempfile
	sleep ${INTERVAL}
	sync
	done

view raw KeepSpinning.sh hosted with ❤ by GitHub

edit: inserted link to new post.

Tests with code and syntax highlighting.

Hello, this is my first blog entry and i'm just testing how to add code.

• The 'Quote' option in the 'new Post' editor just indents the text block; one possibility is to change the font for the selected text block to e.g. Courier, a fixed width font, but of course there is no syntax highlighting.

There are some other solutions i found in the internet:

• SyntaxHighlighter. Looks good, but needs an additional webserver.
  Found it here in this blog: Fresh Espresso: Code Listings on Blogger
  edit: Author hosts it. Howto can be found here: Adding a Syntax Highlighter to your Blogger blog
• http://gist.github.com/. Easy. Paste code, copy link and done. Found that one here: Tips for software engineer: Syntax Highlighting on Blogger - Gist

Below a simple shellscript example with http://gist.github.com/. Just copy&paste your code there, get the 'embed code', paste into the blogger/blogspot html-editor, done.

	#!/bin/bash
	function pause(){
	read -p "$*"
	}
	pause 'Press enter to continue…'

view raw pause.sh hosted with ❤ by GitHub

[EndOfFirstBlogEntry] - Woohoooo.