Hard Drive Sleeping when Trying to SYNC

#1

Hard Drive Sleeping when Trying to SYNC:

Here is my error: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6irzsK1Uu7UOHdfeVFXUFZqaTg

I realize this is most likely an OS issue… So what I have is a secondary HD in my System76 Meerkat PC. The HD goes to sleep at one point of the day and my sync’ing stops. I have tried Ubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu GNOME, Linux Mint. All OS’s do the same thing. How can I get the HD to stay on so my Sync’ing can work properly? I have a 2T as a second drive and a 256 ssd as an OS one. I need INSYNC to work on the 2T.

Also, it seems like the drive doe snot mount upon rebooting. I have to manually run it so INSYNC can work.

#2

Tagging our engineer @lpugoy and he will get back to you.

#3

@omicronkappa278: Apologies for not replying sooner. One way you could try to prevent the hard drive from sleeping is to use the hdparm -B command. From its man page (https://linux.die.net/man/8/hdparm):

-B
Query/set Advanced Power Management feature, if the drive supports it. A low value means aggressive power management and a high value means better performance. Possible settings range from values 1 through 127 (which permit spin-down), and values 128 through 254 (which do not permit spin-down). The highest degree of power management is attained with a setting of 1, and the highest I/O performance with a setting of 254. A value of 255 tells hdparm to disable Advanced Power Management altogether on the drive (not all drives support disabling it, but most do).

You can also take a look at the -S option:

-S
Put the drive into idle (low-power) mode, and also set the standby (spindown) timeout for the drive. This timeout value is used by the drive to determine how long to wait (with no disk activity) before turning off the spindle motor to save power. Under such circumstances, the drive may take as long as 30 seconds to respond to a subsequent disk access, though most drives are much quicker. The encoding of the timeout value is somewhat peculiar. A value of zero means “timeouts are disabled”: the device will not automatically enter standby mode. Values from 1 to 240 specify multiples of 5 seconds, yielding timeouts from 5 seconds to 20 minutes. Values from 241 to 251 specify from 1 to 11 units of 30 minutes, yielding timeouts from 30 minutes to 5.5 hours. A value of 252 signifies a timeout of 21 minutes. A value of 253 sets a vendor-defined timeout period between 8 and 12 hours, and the value 254 is reserved. 255 is interpreted as 21 minutes plus 15 seconds. Note that some older drives may have very different interpretations of these values.

Regarding the “Syncing for … is paused because it went missing” message after rebooting, this is because Insync is started before the drive is mounted. One way to work around it is to add an entry in /etc/fstab for your 2T drive so that it is mounted before Insync is started.