GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 536088
Nautilus unnecessarily accesses external drive when starting up
Last modified: 2021-06-18 15:12:57 UTC
Please describe the problem: Nautilus is slowed down by the presence of an external hard drive, even if it doesn't need to access it. Steps to reproduce: 1. Connect an external USB hard drive (mine is a 500GB Western Digital My Book 2). 2. Mount the drive, and wait for it to enter standby mode (power down after a few minutes of inactivity). 3. Launch Nautilus, starting in a location which is not located on (and does not at all reference) the external drive. Actual results: When loading, it has to pause for several seconds while the external spins up. There is seemingly no need for this. Expected results: It would be very nice if the file manager could leave drives alone until it needs them, so having an external drive wouldn't slow down activity which does not require it. Does this happen every time? Yes Other information: In addition to the issue of application speed, I also don't want the noise and wear associated with spinning up this drive so often. It shouldn't be accessed at all in this situation.
Nautilus tries to mount the volume automatically. You can set /apps/nautilus/preferences/media_automount to false to disable this. I assume you do not use Nautilus to manage your desktop - i.e. you do not launch it with the session, but use it as supplementary file manager - right?
Nautilus does manage my desktop, and I do want to keep automount on. The issue is not that it's automatically mounted - I keep the external drive mounted all the time, so it is already mounted when this happens. The delay is happening when an already-mounted drive gets accessed in some fashion, and it takes a few second to kick it out of its idle mode.
I have this too. You don't need to start a new instance of Nautilus to see this behaviour, you only need to wait for the drive to go into standby and then use an already open instance to navigate somewhere not related to the external drive: Nautilus will freeze up while the drive starts up, which take 1-2 seconds each time. And it is really frustrating. :) Steps to reproduce: 1. Plug in external drive 2. Have Nautilus open 3. Wait for the drive to spin down 4. Do something in Nautilus, say open a folder Expected result: If the actions I take is not on or related to the external media, Nautilus should not start or otherwise wait for the drive. Actual result: Nautilus always starts the drive, and also freezes in waits for it. I use the drive a lot during the day, pushing backups to it, watching movies stored on it and more stuff like that. So I don't want to mount/unmount it manually every time I access it. At the same time, most of my regular usage is not on this drive, but rather in my $HOME and Desktop, with subdirectories to those. But each time the drive has managed to spin down between my usage of Nautilus, it gets this pause. I also have Nautilus as my default desktop/file manager. Ubuntu 8.10 Nautilus 2.24.1
This appears fixed in Nautilus 2.26.0 (Ubuntu Jaunty).
closing then
I've experienced this bug in Nautilus 2.26.0 (Ubuntu Jaunty) and now in 2.28.1 (Ubuntu Karmic). I have 5 Western Digital external USB drives (quite a lot, I know). I did a clean install of Karmic, and after plugging in the drives I notice significant lags in these operations: - Starting up GNOME. I'm running on an SSD, so time to desktop normally is around 10 seconds from GRUB. With the drives plugged in, it takes an additional 10-15 seconds while each drive spins up. - Opening the "Places" menu. Nautilus insists on spinning up each drive when opening the Places menu. - Opening "Computer". - Occasionally in Save or Open dialogs. This is not fixed in GNOME 2.26. Can someone else confirm and reopen this bug? I'd be happy to provide any logs, just let me know which ones. As the fellow who originally issued this report did: $ lsb_release -rd Description: Ubuntu 9.10 Release: 9.10 $ apt-cache policy nautilus nautilus: Installed: 1:2.28.1-0ubuntu2 Candidate: 1:2.28.1-0ubuntu2 Version table: *** 1:2.28.1-0ubuntu2 0 500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com karmic-updates/main Packages 100 /var/lib/dpkg/status 1:2.28.1-0ubuntu1 0 500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com karmic/main Packages
reopening the bug since that's still an issue
GNOME is going to shut down bugzilla.gnome.org in favor of gitlab.gnome.org. As part of that, we are mass-closing older open tickets in bugzilla.gnome.org which have not seen updates for a longer time (resources are unfortunately quite limited so not every ticket can get handled). If you can still reproduce the situation described in this ticket in a recent and supported software version of Files (nautilus), then please follow https://wiki.gnome.org/GettingInTouch/BugReportingGuidelines and create a new ticket at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/ Thank you for your understanding and your help.