Re: Hard Drive Spin Down

Ron Johnson wrote:
On 10/14/08 12:12, Sam Leon wrote:
I have added a large drive to my desktop for back up purposes. I am using rsnapshot to backup just a couple of times a week. Since the drive will be rarely accessed I added:

/dev/sdb {
spindown_time = 180
}

To hdparm.conf to spin down the disk after 15 minutes of inactivity to save power (yea goin' green!)

Everything is working right except when I go to restart or shut down the pc. When I do that, right before init runs halt the hard drive spins up and then the pc shuts off. Does the hard drive have to spin up in order to flush a buffer or something before shut down? Any way to get around this? The sudden spin up and then shut off doesn't seem like it would be good for the disk, makes alot of noise when it does it too.

Is this just "normal" or what?

Yes. The drive must spin up before being dismounted.

I suggest that you only mount the drive when needed. Besides the safety of preventing you from accidentally deleting needed files, it boosts the likelihood that the kernel won't need to spin it up during shutdown.


Hmm, sounded like a good idea but with the drive unmounted and spun down, it still spins up right before a shut down or a reboot. :(

Sam


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