I discovered my mounted My Passport was spinning 24/7. So I opted to hook up a WD Easystor which I know supports spinning down. Only attached to my UnRaid server it is not. I've tried to do my homework by first running the following to see if I could spin it down manually with it unmounted.

root@UnRaid:~# hdparm -C /dev/WD3TbExt

/dev/WD3TbExt: No such file or directory

With no success, I tried the id instead.

root@UnRaid:~# hdparm -C /dev/sdk1

/dev/sdk1:

SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[]: f0 00 01 00 50 40 ff 0a 80 00 00 00 00 1d 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

drive state is: unknown

My goal was to use this script Unassigned Device settings for this drive, but I was stuck on what to put for Device Script and User Script fields. I thought I could paste the text below in the Device Script content.

Is it a lost cause to use an USB external drive as a backup without it having to spin 24/7? Thank you in advance.

#!/bin/bash

# Define the device path for your USB drive
# Replace /dev/sdX with the actual device identifier of your USB drive (e.g., /dev/sdb)
USB_DEVICE="/dev/sdX"

# Check if the drive exists
if [ -e "$USB_DEVICE" ]; then
    # Spin down the drive
    hdparm -y "$USB_DEVICE"
    echo "USB drive $USB_DEVICE has been put into standby mode."
else
    echo "USB drive $USB_DEVICE not found."
fi

It will depend on the USB bridge, most support spin down, but some don't.