Sleeping HDD won't wake up

[drewofdoom]

I have two external HDD enclosures containing one LVM. One of them sleeps and wakes properly. The other, which holds 2 HDDs will sleep properly, but refuses to wake up unless the Pi gets a hard reboot.

I have gone through and e2fsck'd the whole LVM. Furthermore, I have scanned for bad blocks and have done the typical "is my hard drive bad" troubleshooting. The LVM works just fine on a desktop Arch Linux install.

Both are self-powered drives, and no USB hub is involved. I know that I could, in theory, use hdparm to set a ridiculously long time before sleep, but I'd really rather my drives be able to sleep in order to improve their longevity.

Any ideas as to why the drives won't wake up? Or at least a starting point?

[drewofdoom]

Some new testing and some extra information. Here's my current setup in-depth:

Raspberry Pi
-SD Card (boot and system)
-LVM
---iomega single-bay enclosure
---Rosewill dual-bay enclosure

When the Pi first boots up, my LVM activates normally. I can browse locally as well as through samba. After some time I can no longer access the Rosewill enclosure. SSH'ing into the Pi and running ls, I get the following error:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'ls: cannot access /media/Television/Archer (2009): Input/output error')

lsusb:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', '[root@alfred ~]# lsusb
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0424:9512 Standard Microsystems Corp. LAN9500 Ethernet 10/100 Adapter / SMSC9512/9514 Hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0424:ec00 Standard Microsystems Corp. SMSC9512/9514 Fast Ethernet Adapter
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 059b:0370 Iomega Corp.')

pvdisplay:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', '[root@alfred ~]# pvdisplay
PV U7ZKJm-3dv4-FTCu-zMyF-EURh-Onnv-Wd2BhU not recognised. Is the device missing?
PV WBNJDK-cygp-UmQd-keJN-o0dg-8G4e-eEASEi not recognised. Is the device missing?
PV U7ZKJm-3dv4-FTCu-zMyF-EURh-Onnv-Wd2BhU not recognised. Is the device missing?
PV WBNJDK-cygp-UmQd-keJN-o0dg-8G4e-eEASEi not recognised. Is the device missing?
--- Physical volume ---
PV Name /dev/sdb1
VG Name VolGroup00
PV Size 931.51 GiB / not usable 327.50 KiB
Allocatable yes (but full)
PE Size 4.00 MiB
Total PE 238467
Free PE 0
Allocated PE 238467
PV UUID sCdZsB-siKc-w2WZ-Y3ym-Hq9l-Pq1u-XLqqoG

PV U7ZKJm-3dv4-FTCu-zMyF-EURh-Onnv-Wd2BhU not recognised. Is the device missing?
PV WBNJDK-cygp-UmQd-keJN-o0dg-8G4e-eEASEi not recognised. Is the device missing?
--- Physical volume ---
PV Name unknown device
VG Name VolGroup00
PV Size 1.82 TiB / not usable 1.05 MiB
Allocatable yes (but full)
PE Size 4.00 MiB
Total PE 476932
Free PE 0
Allocated PE 476932
PV UUID U7ZKJm-3dv4-FTCu-zMyF-EURh-Onnv-Wd2BhU

PV U7ZKJm-3dv4-FTCu-zMyF-EURh-Onnv-Wd2BhU not recognised. Is the device missing?
PV WBNJDK-cygp-UmQd-keJN-o0dg-8G4e-eEASEi not recognised. Is the device missing?
--- Physical volume ---
PV Name unknown device
VG Name VolGroup00
PV Size 1.82 TiB / not usable 1.05 MiB
Allocatable yes (but full)
PE Size 4.00 MiB
Total PE 476932
Free PE 0
Allocated PE 476932
PV UUID U7ZKJm-3dv4-FTCu-zMyF-EURh-Onnv-Wd2BhU')

Is the USB port going to sleep and refusing to recognize the Rosewill enclosure afterwards? Strange that it only happens with the Rosewill and not the iomega.

[moonman]

Try the latest kernel, maybe it will help: pacman -Sy linux-raspberrypi-latest.

[drewofdoom]

Actually installed that directly after posting the last response. No change.

[drewofdoom]

So, I've managed to use a dirty little workaround to at least keep the problems from happening. Not a fix, mind you. Will likely reduce overall hard drive longevity.

Created a cron job to touch the blank file ".wake" in the root of the LVM once every minute just to keep the connection alive.

[moonman]

Actually spinning up/down too often will reduce the lifespan of the hdd. One of my enclosures does not play nice with spin up down as well. Putting the same drive in a different enclosure solves the problem.