On Wed, 2020-02-12 at 13:10 -0600, Dave Ulrick wrote:
In addition to one PC that mounted a green USB drive under /var I had several other PCs that mounted a NAS under /var. That NAS is intended to store backup files so its hard drive is configured to spin down after 10 idle minutes.
In view of these findings, I've reconfigured my PCs to mount the backups directory under /mnt instead of /var. So far since doing so I've not noticed any spin-up delays related to a USB hard drive or the backup NAS.
Thanks, Tim!
Glad to help, even if I'm not quite sure how I steered things in the right way. ;-) It was one of those "in the back of my mind" ideas.
Gnome (or Gnome-based) things, will put temporary auto-mounting things (flash drives, etc) inside of /var/run/, then give you an apparently separate mount point. You'll get a desktop icon for it, and no immediate indication that it's accessed through /var/run.
I'm not sure if the same applies to KDE.