On my old Windows box there was a setting where I could have it shut down the hard-drives after X amount of time. This is different from hibernation where the entire computer goes to sleep-- the main thing is that I want my mounted drive to be turned off most of the time and to wake up only when I need it.

Is there an equivalent way I can do this in Ubuntu Dapper?

Hi,

For a few weeks I have been exploring Edgy Eft. I am far from an expert, but I am not aware of a way to do this from a GUI. But if you're using IDE drives, I think you should be able to do what you want by adding commands to /etc/rc.local. The only reason I could think why this might not work would be if Ubuntu came along later and overrode them. (Something I didn't use to worry about! ) Anyway, you would use one command for each drive, something like:

The above command would spin the drive down after 20 minutes of inactivity. But be warned that that number is not intuitive. Check the hdparm man page for how that value maps to time.

Thanks, I'll give that a whirl.