Use "safe removal" by default

[Martin Emrich]

Binary package hint: devicekit-disks

I have a Western Digital MyPassport 2,5" USB Hard drive. On Windows and MacOS X, the OS spins down the disk after unmounting/ejecting.

On Ubuntu (current Karmic amd64), the disk stays up after unmounting, and does an emergency retract (The momentum of the spindle is fed back into the voice coil to force the heads to the landing zone). This wears off the mechanics much faster than a normal safe poweroff.

Ubuntu should issue something like "hdparm -Y" if a disk is prepared for safe removal.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Can you please check if it behaves correctly if you right-click on the device icon and choose "safely remove" instead of using "eject" (or the eject button in the bookmark list)?

[Martin Emrich (emme)]

Yes, right-click + "safely remove" spins down the disk (and removes it from the list), clicking the "Eject" icon does not.

After clicking the "Eject" icon, the volume stays in the list. Afterwards, I can still right-click to "safely remove", which then spins down the disk.

IMHO the best behaviour would be to spin down the disk when the last partition gets unmounted, but to keep it in the list. If the user decides to mount a partition afterwards, the disk could surely spin up again.

But it is good to know how to spin it down in the meantime, thanks!

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Thanks for confirming. In fact we already used that by default, but it breaks on some hardware (see bug 404185); this needs to be sorted out before it can become the default.