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Vampire mice and zombie hard drives: USB dangers lurk in Linux

• eikenberry 13y ago
  "One such issue affected a particular brand of portable USB hard drive. Sharp said that an alarming problem occurred when the drive attempted to come out of suspend mode." Anyone know what brand of drive this is? I think it'd be nice to know to avoid it.
  • simcop2387 13y ago
    I'm really curious too, because I don't buy the explination of the problem myself. > “The user hears this horrible scraping noise because the driver forgot to park the disc head before it cut power to the disk,” she said. That shouldn't really be possible to cause that kind of damage, every modern drive I've seen (past 15-20 years?) has an automatic head return when powered off (usually magnetic or spring driven). This would be the same as just pulling the USB plug and having that result then.
• Scaevolus 13y ago
  “It’s about four watts, if you just have one USB device that’s not suspended,” said Sharp. How does that 4W number break down? Is the CPU forced to poll USB devices at 125Hz, preventing it from entering deeper sleep states?
• AndrewVos 13y ago
  This is some silly shit. Edit: I mean the article is silly.