Unmounted disk still spins up regularly

I just added a disk, with partitions but none of them are mounted. The disk will still spin up every now and then. it goes like this:

### disk spins up
hdparm -Y /dev/sdb;date
/dev/sdb: issuing sleep command
9 feb 2011 23.37.08 CET
### disk spins up
hdparm -Y /dev/sdb;date
/dev/sdb: issuing sleep command
9 feb 2011 23.46.12 CET

Also it always spins up when I shut down the computer.

Any tips are welcome, e.g. how can I figure out which process is accessing the disk, are there any daemons doing this? I know it isn't a cron job.

1 Answer

Use -y (standby) instead of -Y (sleep).

It is probably udisks checking the SMART status of the drive. It first checks to see if the drive is in standby and if it is, will skip the SMART check, but just checking to see if the drive is in standby wakes it up from sleep.