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Old 06-22-2017, 02:14 AM   #1
mackowiakp
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Symbolic link and disk spindown


I have 3 HDD installed in my PC. First disc is a 128GB SSD disc with OS only. The second contains large amount of data, but changes on it are very rare. The third HDD collects video clips from surveillance system so it works practically non-stop.
One subdir located on third HDD is linked symbolically to subdir located on second HDD.
I want to spin-down second HDD using hdparm command.
My question is. Does any operation done on physical third HDD will spin-up second HDD because of this symbolic link?
 
Old 06-22-2017, 03:25 AM   #2
AwesomeMachine
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Probably not. It's one of those things you just have to try. Hdparm will return whether the drive is asleep.
 
Old 06-22-2017, 09:15 AM   #3
IsaacKuo
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Huh. I didn't know hdparm had that nice feature. Here's an example:

Code:
hdparm -C /dev/sda; hdparm -C /dev/sdb; hdparm -C /dev/sdc

/dev/sda:
 drive state is:  active/idle

/dev/sdb:
 drive state is:  standby

/dev/sdc:
 drive state is:  standby
Here's an example of code I use to spin down the 2nd and 3rd hard drives:

Code:
hdparm -S 23 -Y /dev/sdc; hdparm -S 23 -Y /dev/sdb

/dev/sdc:
 setting standby to 23 (1 minutes + 55 seconds)
 issuing sleep command

/dev/sdb:
 setting standby to 23 (1 minutes + 55 seconds)
 issuing sleep command
Personally, I would nest the symlink inside an auxiliary directory which is never regularly browsed to. For example, you might put it in /home/macko/Desktop/Links/ instead of putting it directly on the Desktop. Or within /home/macko/Documents/Links/ instead of directly in /home/macko/Documents.

Basically, file system browsers often peek just inside the link for some sort of .directory file or whatever. This might not spin up the drive, if the necessary info is cached. But it's really annoying and hard to pin down the cause when that drive spins up for a nonobvious reason.
 
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