Im trying to get my harddisks to spindown for powersaving, but hdparm doesnt actually seem todo alot under redhat 9.

if i do /sbin/hdparm /dev/hda7 it only gives me the following:

/dev/hda7:
multcount = 16 (on)
IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit)
unmaskirq = 0 (off)
using_dma = 1 (on)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 8 (on)
geometry = 19457/255/63, sectors = 59552892, start = 250935363

If i then try "/sbin/hdparm -S 1 /dev/hda7" (just as a test for 5 seconds) i get the following output:

/dev/hda7:
setting standby to 1 (5 seconds)

Wait 5 seconds... nothing.. doesnt powerdown. If i run hdparm under gentoo on a different shell and harddisk i get about 3 pages of info about my hdd and it works perfectly powering down. Ive enabled powersaving for 30 mins in the bios too, but this doesnt seem to make much difference. I also have apmd running if that helps. My hdd is a Western Digital Caviar 160GB with 8mb cache.

Am i doing something stoopidly wrong??

Thanks

zebb

acording to people in the mandrake mailing list, western digital is not using the full specs that linux expects for reliable data transfers (winblows get around this by using software patches). this can lead up to file corruption.

--cheers