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When I watch movies with VLC from my external Intenso SATA drive on my Ubuntu Mate 20.04 system, some minutes of the video apparently are somehow loaded temporarily, so that the drive will go to sleep after some minutes. When all of the cached video has been played the playback hangs until the drive awakes again and new video data can be loaded. This is very annoying.

I suspect it has to do with system settings. Unfortunately the drive settings option in Mate drive utility menu is grayed out. When I run hdparm -C /dev/sdb, I get this error: /dev/sdb: SG_IO: bad/missing sense data..., drive state is: unknown.

How can I set a longer standby time for the drive? I don't want to set VLC disk buffer to 5400000 milliseconds...

EDIT: So as the standby time is a hardware feature, I'd try to reduce the video cache, but where can I find this setting? I'm only aware of the "milliseconds"-buffer in the advanced settings of VLC.

Shakesbeer
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1 Answers1

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Rinzwind pointed to the solution in his comment: While hdparm didn't work, I was able to change the standby behaviour using sdparm. Thanks a lot, I was already considering to replace the drive.

Here are the relevant parts of the answer by blizzardus from the other thread (Hard Drive error: bad/missing sense data):

Install with

sudo apt install sdparm

Get the spindown timer and the STANDBY flag with:

sudo sdparm -l --get SCT /dev/sdX

sudo sdparm -l --get STANDBY /dev/sdX

If you want you can change these settings for the current session with:

sudo sdparm -l --set SCT=6000 /dev/sdX

sudo sdparm -l --set STANDBY=1 /dev/sdX

These settings will be lost on reboot.

Change permanently with:

sudo sdparm -l --save --set SCT=6000 /dev/sdX

sudo sdparm -l --save --set STANDBY=1 /dev/sdX
Shakesbeer
  • 380