Spinning down a hard drive
yellowdog-newbie@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com
yellowdog-newbie@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com
Tue, 2 Sep 2003 19:16:36 -0500
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>