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I've built a D.I.Y. RAID from a Raspberry Pi, powered USB hub, and two cheap 2TiB USB hard drives:

ghetto RAID

It actually works pretty well, but I'm concerned about how Raspbian Lite is handling power management of the USB drives. Specifically, whether the disks are spinning down correctly when not in use, or whether that's solely a device concern.

Neither lsusb or usb-devices seems to provide information on drive status. Does anyone know how to obtain it? I'm imagining it may involve querying the device directly in some way.

Giacomo1968
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Duncan Bayne
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  • Might be something here that can help....https://superuser.com/questions/651880/force-spin-down-of-external-hard-drive-on-linux-raspberry-pi?rq=1 – Moab Jun 19 '18 at 23:43
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    The tape adds a nice touch. :-) With RAID, you typically don't want the drives spinning down every time they're inactive. The USB interface may not even give you access to all drive controller functions (I just had a USB drive fail, and I had to disassemble it to access the SMART functions). There may be OS power management functions that will power down the drives after a preset time, but there is also likely a drive controller function that does that on its own if it isn't a RAID-designed drive. – fixer1234 Jun 19 '18 at 23:46
  • Thanks for the hints, I'll follow up and post an answer if I figure things out. @fixer1234 re. spinning down RAID drives, no, but this is an atypical use case. Probably won't read from the drives for days at a time, and will write even less frequently. In this case it's all about the mirroring for safety. – Duncan Bayne Jun 20 '18 at 01:03
  • I was distinguishing between powering down the drives when not in use, and spinning them down every time they're idle for a few seconds. – fixer1234 Jun 20 '18 at 01:23

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