Hello all.

I recently moved into a bigger place and I am beginning to plan my local network. I've been thinking that the core of my network would be a nice tower machine (Linux obviously) with multiple 500 GB SATA drives for massive storage, to serve as a MythTV backend and a file server / backup server.

However, since this machine would need to be running more or less constantly, and since I'd like to save energy as much as possible, I was wondering if there is a mechanism by which non-system drives (drives that don't contain the OS) can be spun-down until they are needed, and if such a function can only be invoked manually or if Linux can automatically spin down the drive if it hasn't been accessed for a certain amount of time.

(Any other suggestions for conserving energy in such a setup are also appreciated.)

I don't do this myself, but the hdparm utility offers several options. See the man pages for hdparm for more info, but a couple of the relevant arguments are

-S (Set the standby (spindown) timeout for the drive. This value is used by the drive to determine how long to wait (with no disk activity) before turning off the spindle motor to save power.)

-B (Set Advanced Power Management feature, if the drive supports it. A low value means aggressive power management and a high value means better performance.)

-M (Get/set Automatic Acoustic Management (AAM) setting. Most modern harddisk drives have the ability to speed down the head movements to reduce their noise output.)

try


man hdparm have a read you can use the command

hdparm -Tt /dev/sda to see if it worked