usb harddisk not working

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sat, 21 Nov 2020 13:35:46 +0100, Christoph Harder wrote:
>By the way, do you have any information about settings that reduce the
>power consumption of external disk drives? We expect the disks to be
>mostly idle, but at the moment the power consumption looks pretty high
>(higher than the APU board itself), even when it is not currently
>accessed. Especially information about usb power saving states and
>power consumption in combination with automount would be appreciated.

Hi,

this is a can of worms. Don't open this can! If you have good luck
regarding the controller of the USB casing, it at least does avoid
one issue, it never goes into standby mode, so you don't need to
experience IO errors, unless something is defekt. You might not be able
to enable stand by mode for the drive itself through the USB controller
(not the same as an USB controller's stand by mode or stand by of your
computer's USB ports via the operating system), but you can remove the
drive and connect it directly to a computer to do so and after that
assemble it back to the USB casing. However, the best thing you could
do is to connect the drive when needed and to disconnect it when it's
not needed. Stay a way from fishy USB controllers and don't use energy
saving tools for USB ports, this is asking for trouble. If at all, use
the drive's stand by feature, but as already pointed out before, you
might not be able to enable or disable it through the USB controller.

My guess is, that the USB controller of your external casing comes
already with kind of fish firmware.

I'm very picky when buying an external USB casing, since I experienced
way to often IO errors with most cases I purchased.

Since your case isn't working, return it and get your money back! Most
cases' controllers' firmware is crap!

My 2 Cents based on experiences made the hardest way
Ralf