External hard drive spins down using NTFS but not EXT4 (Raspbian)

Question

I have a new 2015/2016 model Seagate Expansion Desktop (STEB2000300) connected to a Raspberry Pi. I have set on the drives firmware (in Windows 7) so that it turns off automatically after a quick 3 mins. With the drive mounted in Raspbian as NTFS, with the following /etc/fstab setting, it turns off as desired after 3 minutes.

UUID=the devices UUID       /mnt/usbhdd     ntfs-3g    defaults          0       0

Then using the same drive formatted as EXT4, the drive does not turn off automatically after 3 mins, and the hard drives LED continuously flashes as if something is constantly accessing it. The last time I tried I used the steps here to set the drive up as EXT4 again with the drive not sleeping:

Formatted the only partition as EXT4

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdX1 Ext4Label

Disabled journaling

tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/sdX1

Enable writeback mode

tune2fs -o journal_data_writeback /dev/sdX1

Required fsck

e2fsck -f /dev/sdX1

/etc/fstab

UUID=a-different-longer-UUID       /mnt/usbhdd    ext4       defaults,data=writeback,noatime,nodiratime          0       0

I tried using sudo hdparm -y /dev/sdX1 to sleep the drive, it sounds like it turns off for a split second but resumes immediately with the LED blinking continuously. The only way I can get the drive to sleep is by unmounting it:

sudo umount /dev/sdX1

and the drive sleeps after 3 mins. I've also tried finding out what is accessing the drive with sudo fuser -vam /dev/sdX1 but it doesn't show much, only:

                     USER        PID ACCESS COMMAND
/dev/sdb2:           root     kernel mount /mnt/usbhdd

What else is can I try? I would like to use EXT4 over NTFS for better performance in Raspbian.

Answer 1

Thanks to nsilent22 for directing me to a solution. Steps taken:

Unmount partition

sudo umount /dev/sdX1

Command to format to EXT4

sudo mkfs.ext4 -E lazy_itable_init=0,lazy_journal_init=0 /dev/sdX1

My /ect/fstab

UUID=a-different-longer-UUID       /mnt/usbhdd     ext4       defaults         0       0

Remount partition

sudo mount /dev/sdX1

External hard drive now sleeps after the set time in Seagate Drive Settings.