Powering down a harddrive when it's idle.
 

Is it possilbe to have your harddrive power down after x amount of time on idle?

I'm running RedHat 9.0

Yes, the util is called hdparm... I am sortof a newb, but I have screwed around with it--the man page is fairly thourough.

Here is a good tutorial from Oreilly.net on how to use hdparm.

[root@dhcppc4 root]# hdparm -C /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
operation not supported on SCSI disks



I guess hdarm doesn't support SCSI drives. Any other idea's?


Thanks

Is it a SCSI disk or just a SCSI-emulated disk? If it's SCSI-emulated then point hdparm to the original ide device (/dev/hdc or whatever). If it's true SCSI then I don't know how to mess with that.

No it's a true scsi.

Thanks for your help though.

Still looking for a program that will do this for SCSI drives.

I've come across an app called scsitools. I don't know where to get an rpm. The deb package is available through the usual channels if you use debian. Have a look around www.rpm.org for it. It does these things:

scsiinfo: displays SCSI drive low-level information and modifies SCSI
drive settings,
scsidev: makes permanent SCSI LUN -> devicename connections,
scsifmt: low-level SCSI formatter,
sraw: benchmarks raw SCSI I/O rates bypassing the buffer cache,
scsistop: low-level SCSI drive start/stop program,
scsi-spin: program to manually spin up and down a SCSI device.

There's a related package that I've found. It seems to split this up into parts and not all the above is included. The link for it is: http://www.speakeasy.org/~xyzzy/scsi.html. I just typed in "hdparm scsi" into google and found it in minutes. Mind you it was a polish site that directed me to it but I'm sure there are mentions of it in english.

Btw, they seemed to mention the need for a kernel patch if you want your drive to automatically powerdown after a certain idle timeout. Not sure if this is still the case.