Hard drive won't go into standby

Message

drakonite · Post by **drakonite** » Wed Feb 18, 2004 3:01 am

No matter what I tried, I couldn't get my hard drive to drop into standby when idle... Even if I manually use hdparm put the hard drive into standby, it will immediately spin it right back up.

I recently got a new hard drive and there is the same problem, so I know it's not a problem with the drive...

Anyone have any ideas how I could get it to go into standby on idle like it should?

massimo · Post by **massimo** » Fri Feb 20, 2004 7:59 pm

The only reason for this I can think of would be that the hard disk contains swap and/or parts of your Gentoo system or even / as such (I've never tried this, maybe won't even work on root) or you're accessing the drive in some other way when triying to drop your drive into standby (eg. downloading, etc.).

kingmoffa · Post by **kingmoffa** » Wed Mar 03, 2004 3:35 pm

i've been looking into this too ,

I could not get my hdd to spin down without coming straight up again.

A quick solution has been to make a ramdisk and mount proc in it.

Make sure your in the ramdisk dir when issueing the hdparm -y command too.

SkinZ

RemcoNL · Post by **RemcoNL** » Wed Mar 03, 2004 5:38 pm

Another reason for spinning-up again is /var/log/* , and in particular "messages"! Your system writes there all the time...

sigSEGV2003 · Post by **sigSEGV2003** » Thu Mar 04, 2004 2:55 am

Make sure you're not running smartd. Seems to not allow my drive to spindown.

b52_ · Post by **b52_** » Wed Apr 07, 2004 12:51 am

Hi,

kingmoffa, its also possible to tune your syslogdaemon. I configured my syslog-ng to sync every 100 lines. Ok they are lost on a crash, but no risk no fun

My problem is
if i spindown my hard drive without running postfix on it everything is nice, but when postfix is running it suspends only for seconds.

I checked it several times, its definitive up to postfix.
Hmm..does anybody know the reason??
I already exportet my /tmp onto a tpmfs, so its on ram.

Rainmaker · Post by **Rainmaker** » Wed Apr 07, 2004 1:41 am

postfix scans it's mailqeue (by default) every 10 seconds. Might have something to do with that...

flybynite · Post by **flybynite** » Wed Apr 07, 2004 6:01 am

You didn't say what filesystem your using. Last FAQ I saw said Ext3 and Reiserfs touch the disk every 5 seconds. Reiserfs bypasses kupdated which means even noflushd can't stop it from hitting the disk.

If your using ext2, check out noflushd, It's in portage!
http://noflushd.sourceforge.net/

More info at:
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~mukesh/hacks/spindown/t1.html

rcast · Post by **rcast** » Wed Apr 07, 2004 8:36 am

I had a similar problem with my laptop harddisk not spinning down.
Eventually i turned to the laptopmode patch, this stops linux from writing to the harddisk until something is read or 10 minutes have passed. (if system crashes before 10mins=data gone)
But even after switching to laptop mode till had problems, this i found out was due to reiserfs bypassing kupdate, switching to ext3 solved that problem.
I also had to tune my syslog to prevent writing to the log files every time it received an event. I also changed it to log the less critical stuff to console 12.

I can now easily use laptop for 10 mins without it writing to the disk...

Rene

p.s. I know there are patches for laptop mode but i have only been using the -mm kernes which seem to have it included.

Hard drive won't go into standby

Hard drive won't go into standby

Spindown problem and postfix