Spinning Down Hard Drives in OpenSuse 10.3

Submitted by User ProfileRob on 2:50pm, Friday, 2007-10-26

I started out talking about SMART and drive temperatures the other day but got all geeked out about hardware and forgot where I was going. I meant to also talk about how I tried to just spin down my older Western Digital ATA hard drives to give them a chance to cool off.

I looked at the hdparm, I saw some comments on forums saying it could be used to set a time delay to spin-down a hard drive.

Basically you could use it like this:

copper:~ # hdparm -y /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
issuing standby command

Just now when I did that I could hear the hard drive stop. Giving a command like

copper:~ # hdparm -S 5 /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
setting standby to 5 (25 seconds)

Seems to make no difference. I can check the status a minute later and see the drive is still running

copper:~ # for f in a b c d  ; do hdparm -C /dev/sd$f ; done ;
/dev/sda:
 drive state is:  active/idle
/dev/sdb:
 drive state is:  active/idle
/dev/sdc:
 drive state is:  active/idle
/dev/sdd:
 drive state is:  active/idle

Since OpenSuse 10.3 uses the SCSI translation layer for older IDE drives like my first three, I can also use the sdparm command to stop them:

copper:~ # for f in a b c d  ; do sdparm /dev/sd$f --command=stop ; done ;
    /dev/sda: ATA       WDC WD1600JB-00F  15.0
    /dev/sdb: ATA       WDC WD1600JB-00F  15.0
    /dev/sdc: ATA       WDC WD1600JB-00D  75.1
    /dev/sdd: ATA       ST3320620AS       3.AA

The thing is, something's usually in use on a couple of the drives so they'll just spin right back up again:

copper:~ # for f in a b c d  ; do hdparm -C /dev/sd$f ; done ;
/dev/sda:
 drive state is:  standby
/dev/sdb:
 drive state is:  standby
/dev/sdc:
 drive state is:  active/idle
/dev/sdd:
drive state is:  active/idle

I haven't found a utility in YaST or anywhere obvious yet that lets me set a time for the drives to go in to standby or give me a short reason why they can't.

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