Spinning down a hard drive

[yellowdog-newbie@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com]

Friends:

What is the best way to have a hard drive spin down after several 
minutes of inactivity?

The hard drive on my Wallstreet running YDL 3.0 is constantly spinning 
(and it's loud, too). The command to control a hard drive is "hdparm." 
The spinddown option is "-S," with times in 5 second intervals (1=5 
sec, 2=10 sec, etc.). I tried the following command to spin down the 
hard drive after a specified period of inactivity:

<code>
[clint@localhost clint] sudo /sbin/hdparm -S 36 /dev/hda
Password: ****

/dev/hda:
   setting standby to 36 (3 minutes)
</code>

...and nothing happens. After three minutes (or thirty minutes) of 
inactivity, the disk is still spinning merrily away.

I tried setting the spindown value to one minute; after one minute it 
spun down, but soon started up again. To my knowledge, there should be 
little background activity ("top" shows the normal dozens of cryptic 
processes), and there is certainly no user activity. Is this expected 
behavior? Is the command set different on PPC Linux (the same way power 
conservation is different)?

Thanks!

Best wishes,
Clint

-- 
Dr. Clinton C. MacDonald | <mailto:clint.macdonald@ttuhsc.edu>