how do turn off an external hard drive

[Stuart Levy]

On Mon, 26 Sep 2005 20:11:48 -0400, Jim Cornette <fc-cornette at insight.rr.com> wrote:

> Laptop drives have roughly 330 hrs of rated operation per month. When 
> the drives are never powered off, it does not fully  cool and heat 
> buildup will eventually kill the hard drive. They are desgned for 
> roughly 10 hr a day operation, not for continuous use.

Do you have an idea what a normal operating temperature for 2.5" drives might be?
On my usually-on-but-often-idle laptop (running FC2 for relevance to this list!),
    /usr/sbin/smartctl -A /dev/hda | grep Temperature
reports 38 degrees C at the moment.  This doesn't seem very hot as electronics go,
but I don't know about disk drives.

That temperature can rise a good deal if the disk is very active,
or especially if the laptop is in a confined space; its lifetime peak is 53 C,
which does seem uncomfortably warm, but it spends almost no time at such high temps.

Mine is a Toshiba drive, though not a Travelstar -- it's a MK6026GAX.