Configuring Hard Drive Spindown

Schalken · 06-04-2008, 01:11 PM

I am trying to create the following congiguration for my laptop:

The hard drive is turned off.
All writes are being cached in memory.
If a write has been cached for over 2 hours:
1. Turn the disk on and sync all the writes.
OR if data is needed that is not already cached in memory:
1. Turn the disk on and read the required data, caching it in memory.
2. Sync all the writes.
Keep the disk on for 20 seconds incase it is needed again, then turn it off.
REPEAT

In this way, the disk remains turned off for a maximum of 2 hours unless data needs to be read from it.

Could someone tell me what values for the /proc/sys/vm/* and hdparm tunables would achieve this?

Thanks in advance.

onebuck · 06-07-2008, 05:15 PM

Hi,

You can do a 'man hdparm' and 'man smartctl' to get information to get where you want partially.

If you are using the system then the spindown will be minimal. If what you want is to shutdown after no use period then some of what you list is possible. If your 'swap' is on the hdd then you will be cycling a lot if something is active.

Romanus81 · 01-12-2009, 04:36 PM

If a solution to this has been found I would be very interested in doing something like this.

H_TeXMeX_H · 01-13-2009, 02:45 AM

You will need to look into laptop-mode:
http://cvs.sourceforge.jp/cgi-bin/vi...xt?rev=1.1.1.4