I have one of those 10,000 rpm cheetah hard drives in a machine that I’m desperately trying to quiet down. I installed spindown so that it would turn the drive off after being idle for a 6 minutes as the machine is not going to be used a lot.
The problem is that spindown doesn’t seem to be doing anything at all. The spindown daemon is running. Furthermore, if I run the command sg_start --stop /dev/sda, the drive shuts down for a maximum of 8 seconds and then starts back up again. I am wondering if something is using the drive in the background or if I’m just missing a parameter somewhere.
rpm -q spindown
spindown-0.2.1-0.pm.1
/etc/spindown.conf
[General]
cycle-time = 60 # Number of seconds between cycles.
idle-time = 360 # The time in seconds a disk has to be idle before it is spundown.
# Do not use a value that is to small (less than 3600) unless you
# know what you are doing.
syslog = 1 # Turn this on if you want spindown to log messages using syslog.
# You will not want to turn this on if you are trying to spindown
# the disk with the root filesystem on.
Add as much disks as you want.
The following parameters are allowed: id, name, spindown and command.
- id:
You can find the id by doing “ls -l /dev/disk/by-id/”, the advantage of using
id over name is that you can swap disks while the daemon is running and it
doesn’t matter that the device name changes.
- name:
The name can be given up like this: sda, sdb, hda, hdc, …
- spindown:
This is a boolean value, put it on 1 if you want spindown to spindown the disk
or put it on 0 of you want spindown to leave it untouched. The default is 0.
- command:
The parameter to use to spindown the disk using sg_start. The default is “–stop”.
The device name will be automatically added behind this value.
- idle-time:
The time in seconds this disk has to be idle before it is spundown. This overrides
the idle-time configuration in the General section.
Only name or id are needed, but not both.
Examples:
[Disk 0]
id = ata-Hitachi_HTS54161-SB2404SJHD07JE
spindown = 1
[Disk 1]
name = sda
spindown = 1
command = --stop
Thanks a lot.
Mike