safe way to standby sata hdd?

[Michał Piotrowski]

2009/12/16 Eric Sandeen <sandeen at redhat.com>:
> Michał Piotrowski wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I've got a home database/symfony env/etc../file server. It's based on
>> Intel D945GCLF2D Atom board. I've got a two hard drives WD Green Power
>> connected through Sata. First drive has / and /home filesystem, second
>> has /home/samba4. On the first drive there are two directories
>> /home/samba2 and /home/samba3 where I'm mounting ecryptfs.
>> /home/samba4 is also crypted by default.
>>
>> I'm wondering if there is a safe way for such configuration to put
>> second harddrive into sleep (or both drives) after some idle time?
>> After some googling I've found some resolutions (haven't tested any of
>> these yet):
>> - hdparm -S
>
> I use this for the data drive on my mythbox.  I just put this in my
> /etc/rc.local -
>
> # Spin down in 1 hours idle time
> hdparm -S 240 /dev/sda

Have you used this for a disk with your rootfs?

>
> (yeah, oddly, sda is not my boot drive) :)
>
>> - sdparm --set=STANDBY
>> - and laptop_tools
>>
>> I'm really not convinced that these methods are safe for my
>> configuration. Anyone have tried this before?
>
> Yep.  What kind of safety are you worried about?

I know that ecryptfs is just fs stack on top of my ext3 partition, but
still I care about data integrity.

>  It should just work,
> although you want a long enough idle time that you're not constantly
> spinning the disk up and down.

Actually /home/samba4 is not mounted all the time - I'm umountig this
fs when I'm not using it. I'm wondering if there will be any problems
with data integrity when I forgot to umount ecryptfs and disk will be
stopped.

>
> Is there any nice user-friendly frontend to set this?  It'd be nice
> to expose more power management choices to the users (for anything
> that can't be easily defaulted, that is).
>
> -Eric

Regards,
Michal