i have built a small nas with slack 13.37, an intel atom and a single hd. it has been up for several months now. this little nas is only used for backups that run in the middle of the night. the linux systems that write to it do so with rsync over ssh. there are no exported nfs or cifs shares. however, there is one remote cifs mount.

in doing some research about lowering power and extending drive life, i found a western digital kb article about reducing the number of writes by linux systems. they suggested, and i implemented, changing syslogd to syslogd -m 0.

so my question is -- what additional changes can i make to reduce power and, more importantly, allow the drive to spin itself down for extended periods?

Have a look at hdparm or maybe the system would respect a BIOS hard drive timer setting?