s.m.a.r.t. vs spin-down

[Mitch Deoudes]

I'm running into the 
udisks-SMART-checks-prevents-drives-from-spinning-down issue, and I've 
tried all of the config-based fixes to be found by googling, to no 
avail.  I also found this bug: 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1047339  which is marked 
"fixed" for some reason.  Also this one: 
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26508  which suggests the 
only workaround is to disable SMART altogether, or disable udisks 
altogether.

For those not familiar, the issue is that udisksd checks SMART status 
every 10 minutes, and this does not seem to be disableable nor settable 
to a different period.  If you want your disks to spin down after > 
10min, they never will.  (< 10min works, b/c udisksd will skip the SMART 
check on a sleeping drive.  But it also means potentially many more 
load/unload cycles, which is no good.)

Can someone more familiar confirm that there's no way around this? Also, 
if I'm willing to manually mount/unmount my drives, and roll my own 
SMART polling, will removing udisks altogether have any other adverse 
effects?  That's the way I'm leaning, but never having heard of udisks 
before discovering it was keeping my drives awake, I'm not familiar with 
all aspects of it.

Linux Mint Petra
udisks2 2.1.0-4