Bug 184449 - Launching the "Open" Dialog causes hard drives in standby to spin up
Summary: Launching the "Open" Dialog causes hard drives in standby to spin up
Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 261552
Alias: None
Product: kfile
Classification: Applications
Component: general (show other bugs)
Version: 4.7.x
Platform: Compiled Sources Linux
: NOR normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: kdelibs bugs
URL:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2009-02-15 21:09 UTC by Dan
Modified: 2012-09-26 10:35 UTC (History)
8 users (show)

See Also:
Latest Commit:
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Description Dan 2009-02-15 21:09:28 UTC
Version:            (using KDE 4.2.0)
Compiler:          gcc 4.3.2 
OS:                Linux
Installed from:    Compiled From Sources

When I click "File" -> "Open" in any application the open dialog box appears.
Whenever I launch this "Open" dialog (or dolphin) all the drives with mounted partitions start spinning up, which is obviously not necessary.

For example, I have an external USB HDD and an internal SATA HDD with data I usually do not access frequently. Therefore I configured them to spin down after being idle for 10 minutes.

I use the "Open" dialog in applications frequently and the drives start to spin up as soon as it pops up, even though I do not want to access them. This is very bad for the hard drives, because they have a limited number of start/stop cycles.

It also wastes the battery of laptop computers with multiple hard drives (when one of them is not being used actively).
Comment 1 Tobias Doerffel 2009-02-20 16:17:13 UTC
I can confirm this bug.
Comment 2 Dario Andres 2009-05-08 16:10:03 UTC
May be this could be related to the Places view (which shows the currently mounted drives.. and may be it is accessing them)
Comment 3 Christoph Feck 2009-05-21 12:37:35 UTC
Does the spin up only happen for mounted drives, or also for unmounted drives?
Comment 4 Christoph Feck 2009-05-21 13:12:10 UTC
SVN commit 970913 by cfeck:

Do not draw transparent capacity bar

This stops the places panel from polling disk space info, until
you hover over the item. Please give feedback if this improves the
disk spin up misbehaviour.

CCBUG: 184449


 M  +4 -4      kfileplacesview.cpp  


WebSVN link: http://websvn.kde.org/?view=rev&revision=970913
Comment 5 Dan 2009-05-31 18:06:17 UTC
(In reply to comment #3)
> Does the spin up only happen for mounted drives, or also for unmounted drives?
This only applies to mounted drives.


(In reply to comment #4)
>Please give feedback if this improves the
> disk spin up misbehaviour.
Thanks, but unfortunately this does not fix the issue. I patched my kdelibs (4.2.3) with your changes, but it did not help :(
Comment 6 Christoph Feck 2009-06-01 19:23:27 UTC
Kevin, KFilePlacesView/Model uses Solid to check device types. Is there any way to prevent spin up of mounted disks in Solid, or is the code in kdelibs/kfile still wrong?
Comment 7 Kevin Ottens 2009-06-01 19:52:22 UTC
I don't know the disk capacity polling code in KFilePlacesView/Model that well, it got implemented by ereslibre and was supposed to poll only on hover (apparently that got broken later on).

As for Solid itself it shouldn't spin up the disks at all in most cases. It doesn't read files to do its job. The only times when it could happen with the HAL backend are when:
 - you try to mount a volume, and the said volume is declared in fstab
 - you try to get the mountpoint of an unmounted volume (then it'll try to guess one, and if everything else fails it looks into fstab to check if the volume is declared there).
Comment 8 Shaun Reich 2009-08-04 22:05:18 UTC
Not sure if it is just me or not...but I cannot reproduce with an up to date t runk co, I tried it with my external USB disk, then when that didn't work, my internal one. Both were mounted and put to sleep manually via 'hdparm -Y /dev/sdd'. My internal is especially loud (since it's 10 years old), so I would have heard it if it woke up, and I could feel my external not waking up.

I had everything closed out before putting it to sleep, then I tried opening Kate, clicking open.. nothing, even when I was at $home, which has symbolic links to those drives. Also tried was opening up Dolphin.

Perhaps it is being cached, and merely hdparm and opening a file dialog just opens the previously used cache...but over time it eventually is cleared? </random possibility maybe>
Comment 9 alancio 2011-12-06 01:16:56 UTC
This bug is still present in KDE 4.7.3.
I use autofs to mount a filesystem from a server via nfs on demand.
When I open a file dialog in KDE (the nfs client), I can hear the server's hard drive spinning up, and KDE freezes for a while.
Comment 10 Myriam Schweingruber 2012-09-07 14:58:13 UTC
I can't reproduce this here with KDE 4.9.0, using external hard drives connected with USB 2.0. Any news on this?
Comment 11 alancio 2012-09-07 15:13:13 UTC
The problem is still there in KDE 4.9.0.
To test this just make your hard drive sleep by running: hdparm -Y /path/to/device, then open a file dialog in any KDE program.
The program will freeze until the hard drive is spinning.
Comment 12 Christoph Feck 2012-09-07 16:21:23 UTC
Yes, nobody fixed it yet.
Comment 13 Lukáš Tinkl 2012-09-26 10:35:32 UTC

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 261552 ***