ide HDD shutdown: hdparm is enough?

[hujuice]

Hello everybody.

Tuning the power consumption of my laptop, I posed a question to myself. I forward it to this geek community.
«hdparm, tuned with -B and -S options, really turns the HDD power consumption off?»
I mean really off.

The HHDs of my laptop are:

hda (80G): windows, a large storage area (almost empty) and freespace
hdb (80G): manylinuxpartitionLVMareastrangeexpreimentscrazythingsmadnessandoson

So, right after the dirty GRUB job, my hda is almost totally unused (consider that my real storage area is not the laptop area, is at home). Really rarely, I mount some stuff from that disk.
So, that HDD should be OFF (but I could need to power it on in some case).

So, my previous question...

Greets,
HUjuice

PS: GRUB is in the MBR of hda, so hda must perform a little job when I power on.
This configuration is because Windows is a bit nervous, has gut reactions and is quite presumptuous. I believe that if "he"'s on hda1, first drive, first bus and if he feels first in your mind, he'll need less maintenace. Mmmhh.. I'm wrong?
_________________
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[Cyker]

I have a similar thing; In mine, hdc is the secondary boot disk, which will become the 64-bit Gentoo area when I deem 64-bit sufficiently usable.

Because it literally does nothing, I've been trying to find ways to make it goto sleep and stay sleeping while the system is running normally.

At first, I just sent "hdparm -y /dev/hdc", which sent it to sleep, but recently the damned things been waking up and I can't figure out what's causing it

(Tangent: If anybody has suggestions on tracking down the offending 'thing' causing this, please let me know!)


For now, I've worked around it by supplying the stronger -Y, which puts the drive in standby, where it happily ignores any request to talk to it. Unless whatever's waking it up from -y sleep somehow figures out how to soft-reset the IDE controller too...