I have a few external hard drives that are connected over USB for backup storage. I power them down when not in use because it unnecessarily uses power and adds wear to the drives.

After a couple power downs on the drives they started to give an audible sort of heavy ‘clunk’, not too loud, just seemed louder than a hard drive should be.

I ran SMART scans and found that ‘Power-off Retract Count’ is at 4 (above 100 drive should be taken out of service) on a brand new drive.

I searched for several hours on forums to the cause of the emergency retracts. It appears that gnome does not power down the device after it is ejected. Several other people had the same issue and there didn’t seem to be any real resolution other than to run:

udisksctl power-off -b /dev/sdX

or to open gnome-disks and to manually power down the drive after ejecting.

Is there a way to make right clicking on the drive to eject automatically also power down the drive? This seems like a major issue that one of the more popular DEs method of ejecting hard drives is so destructive.