All,

I have two of the SATA Hitachi hds722020ala330 drives. The specs from the Hitachi site suggest that it supports a Standby timer. I have tried using hdparm as follows:

hdparm -S120 /dev/sdc

The command appears to work but the drive never powers down. I'm fairly confident the drive is not being accessed since it does not have a partition on it. I can successfully put the disk in standby with hdparm -y /dev/sdc.

Googling has suggested that maybe hdparm is not best suited to SATA drives favouring sdparm. I have tried setting the standby timer with the following:

sdparm --set=SCT=3600 /dev/sdc
sdparm -s SCT=2600 /dev/sdc
and other variations

All come back with:
/dev/sdc@ ATA Hitachi HDS72202 JKAO
change_mode_page: failed fetching page: Power condition

Google results are less than helpful. If I issue sdparm --all -v /dev/sdc I get:
Read write error recovery [0x1] mode page [PS=0]
....
Caching (SBC) [0x8] mode page [PS=0]
....
Control [0xa] mode page [PS=0]
...
>>Power condition - old version mode page [0xd] not found
>>Power condition mode page [0x1a] not found.

This leads me to believe that despite the drive's specs it doesn't support standby as the settings I need are in the Power condition page.

Fedora 14 - 2.6.35.9-64fc14.i686

Any ideas, thoughts or suggestions