If you use external USB drives and storage devices, you can safely disconnect and disconnect them in the graphical desktop environment of your Linux system with a few clicks. Devices issued in this way will no longer be accessible, as the associated block device names will be lost and the hardware will be de-energized. By default, we can only re-use hardware by physically reconnecting it, which requires human intervention. There may be a need to still have access to our software-disconnected, turned-off storage device without having to physically unplug it and then reconnect it. If for any reason you want to be able to access your logically disconnected and unplugged USB storage device, this tutorial will look at how to restart and make available your external HDD, flash drive, or card reader without having to physically reconnect it.

When you connect an external USB drive or flash drive to your machine, the Linux system will automatically mount its file system for the appropriate user. However, this automatic mount may fail for some reason and you will get a small window with an "Not authorized to perform operation" error message.

An important consideration when building a home computer or server is the data transfer rate of the machine's hard drives. If the speed of the drives in the machine is slow, it will severely degrade overall performance, even if the processor and / or RAM represent a stronger category. It is possible to measure this with all operating systems, it is not different with Linux systems. In this description, we test the speed of our HDD in several ways to get a more comprehensive picture of the status of our devices.