Hey guys,

I have a little server with couple of hard drives in it and I was wanting to make a script (bash or perl is all i'm good at - probably not suited) that will put the hard drives to sleep when there is no activity.

Hence saving a bit of power and hopefully a bit of hard drive life.

I was wondering how I could check for activity cause checking for activity will probably cause activity right?

Also I was wondering what to use instead of hdparm as almost all the drives are SATA's and not PATA's.

There are 4 seagates (320x3,200x1) running off 2 sata expansion cards, and another PATA seagate 320 but that is the system drive so no use sleeping that.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Cheers,
Rob

First off, bash is probably a very good choice. There is a utility called sdparm which is essentially what you want. Hrm, I'm not sure how to check for activity though.

Check out hdparm(8), and laptop-mode for the 2.6 kernel. See also:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/power-m....xml#doc_chap5

Hi,

PatrickNew and jeffschwab are absolutely correct: "hdparm" and friends are what you're looking for. And you don't even need to write any "scripts" - simply download the software and setup the configuration you prefer.

Here are a couple of other links:

http://technowizah.com/2007/01/debia...anagement.html

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Use_hdp...ce_performance

Wow thanks a lot guys.

I take it most of this stuff is transferable/available to rpm systems?

I'm sure it is. I see suse in your profile, I'd be shocked if Suse didn't provide an official [s|h]dparm package.