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I am remotely managing an Ubuntu 20.04 host that has an external drive attached to it. I am not using the drive very often and I am powering it down to preserve its lifetime (as shown here). However after powering it off, the external drive "disappears" from the Disks management window, and there is no way to power it back on unless a) someone disconnects and reconnects the USB cable or b) the system is rebooted (which I do not want to do for other reasons).

Is there a way to power on the external USB drive again remotely and without rebooting?

Panos
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I am not convinced that turning a hard drive off lengthens its life. If you cannot restart the machine to restart the drive, then just leave it running.

A good hard drive can run non-stop without harm or seriously shortening its life.

So it is a trade off:

Restart the machine when needed and turn off the drive (rarely used you said), or

Leave the drive running as that will not seriously harm it.