I’m trying to get a rarely used data drive to spin down. hdparm -y /dev/sdf works. It goes to standby and stays there. I tried setting the timer for it using hdparm -S 1 /dev/sdf and it says it set the standby time to 5 seconds, but it never spins down. I know nothing is accessing the drive.
Am I doing something wrong?
Thank you.
Please, please, please. Allways start telling which version of openSUSE you use.
Sorry, 12.3, but I don’t see how this is really version specific to the extent no one can help at all… (I’ve been having the same issues w/ this brand drive since opensuse 11, years ago)
But anyway… I’ve been reading about it all morning and it is due to my drives being those WD Green drives! I had no idea they’d be so much trouble! And I just discovered the load cycle count on my drives is 129893 and increases about every 10 seconds! Also due to a WD Green issue!
I think I’ve learned I can disable the WD power saving features using idle3-tools, and then maybe hdparm will work.
I’m open to advice. I have older WD green drives (wd-ears)where the load count is skyrocketing. My newer green drives (wd-ezrx) have the same default 8 second idle timer and their load cycle count is not increasing so drastically. Not sure what the difference is there. But neither the several year old drives or these brand new ones respond to the hdparm -S command.
On 2013-08-04 18:16, wicked1 wrote:
>
> I’m trying to get a rarely used data drive to spin down. hdparm -y
> /dev/sdf works. It goes to standby and stays there. I tried setting
> the timer for it using hdparm -S 1 /dev/sdf and it says it set the
> standby time to 5 seconds, but it never spins down. I know nothing is
> accessing the drive.
> Am I doing something wrong?
Try different values, and see. The parameter is up to the disk
manufacturer how exactly it is interpreted. I have never tried so low a
value.
I just did on an external disk:
Telcontar:~ # hdparm -S 100 /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
setting standby to 100 (8 minutes + 20 seconds)
Telcontar:~ #
But the room is too noisy for me to notice what happens.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.3 x86_64 “Dartmouth” at Telcontar)
It is not very interesting if you think it matters or not. It is a matter of getting in touch with people who may try to help you. Knowing what you are using there is feeling more in touch with you. When people have the same version, they might try for themselves to feed information back. When people feel you are keeping all things secrets to yourself, they may simply leave this thread as it is and go for a more promising one where background to a problem and exact description of the environment are given spontanious.
This about the general case. And about your specific one, the man page of hdparm says
Some options may work correctly only with the latest kernels.
Thus looking at the openSUSE version as a starter and the kernel version isn’t that far off one of the pathes to investigate imho.
My first attempt was for idle at 20 minutes, and it didn’t work. These WD Green drives are strange. hdparm -B doesn’t work with them either. It generates an error APM_level = not supported. I need to get a good backup. Then I’ll try disabling the drives built in power management, and see if I can control it with hdparm. I’ll post results when I’ve got them.
hcvv, I appreciate your response and will be sure to list my version from now on!
Disabling the drives idle3 timer didn’t solve the issue. (It solved the load cycle count/head parking issue, but not the spin down issue)
I gave up on hdparm, and installed hd-idle, which is working perfectly.