Shutting down hard drives {Partly solved}

[john030655]

I remember from some other distro's in the past, an option to "spin down hard disc's whenever possible".
Is there an app for this in PCLOS.
I have 3 hard drives, one for windows, one for PCLOS and one for storage (all internal).
It would be nice if I could get two of them to spin down as they are not called on too much.
The rest of the details of my system is in my signature.

[Texstar]

Do you know how to use hdparm?

[john030655]

Do you know how to use hdparm?

No, I am not aware of it.

[glamdring]

I found a few links regarding hdparm/HDD tuning. One common factor is AS, so hopefully he can come and share his intelligence on this subject.

http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php/topic,89291.0.html

Several commands have effects on sata drive. I didn't try all of course, but I remember to have changed the power management of my notebook SATA drives because they were heating too much, (hdparm -M ...), of course at price of slightly lower performance.

If you are going to experiment with hdparm, be careful and check commands against official documentations of your drives.
Additionally, several packages may interfere with your settings, i.e. laptop-mode and others related to power management, boot scripts, ....

interesting site, with useful info: http://www.serialata.org
and, specifically (see SATA power management)
http://www.serialata.org/developers/technical_library.asp

this thread has other info related:
http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php/topic,90015.0.html

AS

[AS]

I found a few links regarding hdparm/HDD tuning. One common factor is AS, so hopefully he can come and share his intelligence on this subject.

 

I have 3 hard drives, one for windows, one for PCLOS and one for storage (all internal).
It would be nice if I could get two of them to spin down as they are not called on too much.

The suggestion may depends on what you what to achieve. Save energy ? Reduce heating ? Reduce acoustic noise ?
Also, as I wrote in the quoted threads, depend on disks ... (Brand/model, ATA compliance ...).

http://www.serialata.org/documents/SATA_Power_Management_article_final_04_08_2009.pdf

The ATA8-ACS standard describes four modes of power consumption for SATA products
1. Active – The device is fully powered up and ready to send/receive data.
2. Idle – The device is capable of responding to commands but the device may take longer to
complete commands than when in the Active mode. Power consumption of the device in this
state is lower than that of Active mode. If a hard drive is present, it is spun up.
3. Standby – The device is capable of responding to commands but the device may take longer (up
to 30 seconds) to complete commands than in the Idle mode. Power consumption is reduced
from that of Idle mode. If a hard drive is present, it is spun down.
4. Sleep – This is the lowest power mode. The device interface is typically inactive and, if a hard
drive is present, the drive is spun down. The device will exit the Sleep mode only after receiving a
reset. Wake up time can be as long as 30 seconds.

This is a starting point, to understand what options the disk provide or not.

You need also to consider the OS settings: a journal filesystem like ext4 per default sync every 5 seconds, you need to tweak your system either by changing timings, or unmount the disk partitions if unused, otherwise the "spin down" will last  at next disk access ... within 5 seconds.

I suppose you could unmount the "windows drive", but what about the "storage" disk ?
Is it OK for you to unmount the storage disk too, and manually mount it when needed ?

AS

[john030655]

Wow!! It all seems a bit complicated!
A while back when I was running a gnome desktop, I had a desk top setting that you just ticked to "spin down hard disc's where possible"
With this selected my storage disc and windows disc would after some time just stop and then when I called on a file that was on either of them, they would just start up again.
For me this was just useful for saving excess use of my hard drives and also the noise. 3 x hard drives running plus extra case fans and nvidia fans makes quite a racket!
It's not really that important, I was just asking if there was an app similar to the one in gnome, but it appears not.
So I will just leave things as they are and mark this post as solved.
But many thanks everyone for the info and links.