hard drive performance and power management

mattmatteh · Guru Joined: 10 Mar 2004 Posts: 449 Location: near chicago

i have read and tried useing hdparm to have it sleep when not used for a while. i dont notice it sleeping. i was hoping it would spin down during the night as i leave my computer on all the time.

what are safe optimizations for the hard drive? i have read several but many come with warnings.

albright · Posted: Sun May 23, 2004 3:59 pm Post subject: hd sleeping

Your harddrive will go to sleep only if there are no processes
accessing it. So you have to make sure that nothing is running
that does so. For example, it seems to me (without a deep
investigation) that sshd, cupsd and other services access the
harddrive pretty frequently. My notebook without those services
running sleeps for long periods. So maybe you should start
by checking out what services you have running in the background.

Of course, some people think that it is bad for the harddrive to
sleep (that is, it will fail sooner if it sleeps and wakes off and on
rather than being continously "spun up"). Google indicates that
this topic is highly debateable