Most popular desktop Linux distributions automatically mount USB storage devices when the devices are connected or at least provide an easy way to mount them from the GUI. Does mounting a USB storage device the "default" way (from the GUI) write anything to the device? It's simple enough to mount the device as read-only, but if I don't explicitly write to the device (with cp
, touch
, mkdir
, etc.) will the operating system write anything in the background?
I have a hardware RAID controller for two USB hard drives configured in RAID 1. At some point I may want to remove the drives and examine them individually to make sure that content is being written to both and to check on the drives' health. I'm concerned that if I forget to mount the drives as read-only the operating system (in my case Manjaro Linux) might update something that I'm unaware of (perhaps "last time mounted" or "last time data was accessed") and break the RAID 1 setup.
Thank you for your time!
man tune2fs
for example. You could use iosnoop to trace all i/o to your device.