I own a Seagate Free Agent external hard drive for last 4-5 years. After plugged in and finished with file transfers I will click menu 'Safely remove'. Then it will gracefully shut down itself, stopping spinning of disk inside. I can feel it if touched. Also, power light will be also off.
Recently I bought a new external hard disk, WD Elements. If I issue 'Safely remove' for this hard drive, it just get unmounted, but not powering off itself, also the disks continue spinning, I can feel when touched. I also tried 'Power off the drive' button in 'Disks' application comes with Ubuntu. Then also, it just get unmounted only.
I would like see the WD Elements hard drive gracefully shutdown itself, before I manually unplug it. I assume forcefully unplugging the device before it stops itself may shorten its lifespan.
Is there any other command or program that will help me to do it?
Best Answer
You need an additional package that contains a utility to actually power off the WD as WD does not support Linux out of the box:
where
XandYare the letters corresponding to your disk.