External harddrive not spinning down on suspend

[JB]

Norit <norit <at> komma.info> writes:

> ...

You may be wrong on both counts.
That's why I sugested you may want to investigate :-)

> this is definitely not a BIOS issue since it worked fine with opensuse
> 11.3 and except for the OS i did not change anything.

OpenSUSE distro is not equal Fedora distro.
Each of them has a differently patched kernel and many packages are tweaked
differently as well.
So your assumption is wrong.

> And I don't see
> how powering my USB ports during standby will get my drive to spin down
> during suspend.

Well, you ain't seen anything yet ... I mean how software works :-)
E.g. the PM package discovers there is a USB device to handle (suspend), it
checks some BIOS-related switch (device to be powered on during PM states),
and erroneously skips handling that device (logical error).
Perhaps the programmer had a bad day, her boyfriend left her, she wants to
fix it later (keep her job; software maintenance is a job description) :-)

Have I convinced you ?
If I were you I would test that condition at least.

Oh, btw, in Fedora:
System - Preferences - Power Management

I just tried to help :-)

JB