On my Fedora Core 3 machine I have 2 identical 120gig WesternDigital hard drives on a PCI IDE controller: /dev/hde and /dev/hdg. FC Linux and /home are on hde. I use hdg only once a day for backing up so I don't mount it on startup and when i'm not using it I turn it off with

hdparm -Y /dev/hdg

The only problem is that after I do this, the following occurrs every 30 minutes:

* The computer is non-responsive for 3 seconds. (Mp3 playback also pauses during that period)
* CPU usage goes from the usual 1% to 100% and then back to 1% when it becomes responsive again.

I don't want to use hdparm with the -y (lowercase y) option, because that makes the disk spin up after a while, even though it's not even mounted.

Is there a way to avoid this hanging?
Am I doing something wrong?
Is there maybe a better way to fulfill my needs?

thank you.
Guðmundur Örn Jóhannsson from Iceland.

If your not using it you should just unmount it. No need to perform any hdparm on it.

When you need to backup, mount it and when your done with it unmount it.

The reason I am using hdparm is of course to shut the drive down, to minimize the noise emitted from the computer, which is important to me.