[RESOLVED] auto turn off hard drive

[kzee]

hi,
i have a goflex home. archlinux is woking great so far
just wondering is there a way to turn off the hard drive automatically after a period of inactivity ? or put it in sleep mode?
thanks

[hydro]

I'm not too familiar with SATA drives, but I think hdparm can handle them as well. You can set the standby timeout (10 minutes in this example, see man page)
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', '
hdparm -S 120 /dev/sda
')
or force standby immediately
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', '
hdparm -y /dev/sda
')
However, if your operating system is on your hard drive, you may have to set some other options to avoid spinning up again too soon, if a process wants to write to disk. If hdparm doesn't work, try sdparm or sg_start (package: sg3_utils). The latter is also required by spindown (in AUR).

[kzee]

thanks hydro.
i tried the hdparm and it worked
however, like you said it spins up after 10mins or so.
how do i know which process(es) are writing to the disk ?

thanks

[hydro]

Well, fuser and lsof may help, e.g.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', '
lsof +D /
')
displays processes that have open files in the root mount path. You can try to remove some unneeded daemons from /etc/rc.conf, but this probably won't help much. Here are some more hints. Mounting some directories on an USB flash drive (for files that are primarily read, e.g. /usr) or in RAM (for files that are often written, e.g. /var/log) may be an option.

[kzee]

i followed the link u posted
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/La ... ools#Disks
and installed laptop-mode-tools
it is working perfectly now

thanks for pointing me to the right direction

[ldi9999]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('kzee', 'i') followed the link u posted
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/La ... ools#Disks
and installed laptop-mode-tools
it is working perfectly now

thanks for pointing me to the right direction

[moonman]

This is what I have in my cron (run "crontab -e")
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', '*/15 * * * * ID=DriveIdle /usr/bin/sdparm -C stop `mount | grep <partition label> | cut -c1-9`')

<partition label> is the name of one of the partitions on the hard drive, does not matter which one if there are many. It basically extracts the path (/dev/sdx) from the mount command because every time you boot the path can change to sda sdb sdc depending on how many hdds you have plugged in.

[moonman]

You would also need to install sdparm with pacman -Sy sdparm

[ldi9999]

Thanks for the info. So what does this configuration do? Put hard drive in idle for how long,when to wake up, etc..? Please explain. Thanks again!

[moonman]

cron will execute the command I rpovided every 15 minutes so the hdd will spin down. It will spin up when you want to access it automatically.