Hi All!

I don't know if this is the right place to discuss my problem, if it isn't so, just let me know .
I have a very noisy HDD with a lot of stuff on it, but I don't want to access it frequently, so it would be great if i could somehow turn it off when i don't need anything from it, and then turn on back when i need to access it. Sure i can pull the power plug off when i don't need the HDD, but i would prefer some more gentle way to shut it up :-) The HDD is a simple 40Gb IDE HDD @722rpm on /dev/hdb. Can I stop it when my sytem is running?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

If your not running any system files or swap space from it then simply unmount it.

You could even remove entries for from your 'fstab' file so that it won't be mounted at boot and then only mount it when you need it.

Thanks okmyx! That's ok, but I found another tool, hdparm with which I can totally shut my HDD down. I can make it to enter either standby(hdparm -y DEVICE) or sleep (hdparm -Y DEVICE) state. Both means that it spins down.
The Linux IDE driver will automatically handle issuing a reset if/when needed.
But there's another thing : Now that I can make my HDD to enter sleep state, I'm wondering if I could just physically take it away from the running machine and then give it back, for example, with a mobile-rack.
Does anyone tried it so far? If so, let me know. I don't want to harm my drive with an operation like this.

Thanks!

A USB hard-drive would probably be more appropriate for this task.