Actually unmounting and removing power off HDDs

On windows 10, when ejecting a hard disk drive, it will stop spinning. That is nice. It, of course, unmounts the partitions before.

Linux does not do this automatically, at least not my minimalist setup that only uses dmenu,lsblk,mount,umount and a little of grep/sed/other text-editing tools.

When unmounting a drive using umount it merely unmounts the disk partitions. It DOES NOT manage power, as far as I know.

To remove power from the HDD, I use a tool named hdparm, used to set HDD parameters through the shell. The package should be installed by default on archlinux, this is the project page (it has adware).

Anyways, to set the HDD params you need to be root. I don’t know how to set the permissions so that a normal user can do this, but I’m not interested in learning how to do that cause if an attacker gains command execution on my system I don’t want them to have access to managing my HDDs power.

I use this script:

    timeout 10s prompt "Remove power from $1 ? " "sudo -A hdparm -Y $1" &&
    notify-send "$ dmenuumount" "Power removed from ${1}. You may disconnect it now."

the important part is hdparm -Y "$1". This flag -Y (yes, capital Y) means put the device in the lowest possible power mode. It will still be listed under lsblk but it will turn on once you actually want to mount it. the "$1" is the path for the device, e.g. /dev/sde.

As noted before, you must be root. BE SURE to check the device, since running this command on any devices you are using could fuck up the system!

questions ? contact me.