Preventing spun-down disks from spinning up at shutdown

Unclethommy · Guru Joined: 24 Jul 2006 Posts: 407

Hi there,

I have been able to edit hdparm so that it spins down any of my (many) hard disks when they are not used for longer than 20mins. This works like a dream and I am happy with the knowledge that the disk is not consuming so much power and that I am (hopefully) prolonging the harddrive's life (although I understand that repeated spinning-up/down will wear out the drive).

Something I have noticed is that when the system is shutdown, when gentoo says "unmounting all filesystems", I can hear each of the spun-down disks spin up again for a few seconds before the computer finally powers down. I am presuming this may add to wearing the disks out and I was wondering if anyone has had this problem and found a work around to stop the disks being accessed just before the system is shutdown? Or is this an inevitable thing which can't be avoided?

poly_poly-man · Posted: Sun Jun 01, 2008 6:33 pm Post subject:

unfortunately, unless you unmount the disks as you spin them down, this won't work.

Keep in mind that at any point when a disc is mounted, it can be out of sync() (I think spinning it down takes care of this - syn() moves the cache to the disk), and killing a mounted filesystem can causee damage just because of how filesyatema work.

Believe me, on my 486 with BIOS auto-spindown, it annoys me too

poly-p man
_________________
iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAA

avatar: new version of logo - see topic 838248. Potentially still a WiP.

Unclethommy · Guru Joined: 24 Jul 2006 Posts: 407

Is there any way to unmount a file system which has been inactive for say 5mins and then set the disk spindown after 6mins? In my experience, mounting the file system takes seconds... would this be possible? If so, is it possible to remount it when it is accessed? Would automount do this?

poly_poly-man · Posted: Sat Jun 14, 2008 7:49 pm Post subject:

well, it may work in some sort of script on an unnecessary partition, but think about it - if you umount /, you won't be able to access it until next reboot.

poly-p man
_________________
iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAA

avatar: new version of logo - see topic 838248. Potentially still a WiP.

harrisonmetz

[quote="Unclethommy"This works like a dream and I am happy with the knowledge that the disk is not consuming so much power and that I am (hopefully) prolonging the harddrive's life (although I understand that repeated spinning-up/down will wear out the drive).[/quote]

A while back I thought about doing power saving to be more "green" and save the life of my components. But once I harddrive is spinning there is virtually no wear on the drive (assuming it can be cooled). Its the powersaving which spins it up and down which causes wear. The only one of my hard drives to die was a windows drive with spun down every 20 mins of not being used.