Power save for SATA drives

[mister_v]

Hi,

I want to save power on my media server by spinning down the hard drives.

Does anyone known any good tools?


Thanks,

[Chris]

You can do this with:

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hdparm -S 240 /dev/sdc

This will tell you hard drive to power down after 20min of inactivity.

I have read in many forums that it only works for IDE drives,
and doesn't work for SATA drives.
Anyway on my machines it works,
And I have drives from Samsung, Western digital and Hitachi.

You can see the status of you drive with:

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hdparm -C /dev/sdc
/dev/sdc:
 drive state is:  standby

Standby means powered down
active/idle means not being read/write but still spinning.

You can tell you drive to immediately power down with:

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hdparm -Y /dev/sdc

One word of advice:
don't use the commands for the drive with the root partition,
or /tmp , /var/tmp , /var/log, ... any of the dirs that are used a lot.
It won't save you power and probably kill your drive in a year or 2.

Read the manual before you use the commands:
http://linux.die.net/man/8/hdparm