How can I spin down the hard drive?

[John Wendel]

On Tuesday 20 January 2004 11:22 pm, Rick Stevens wrote:

> don wrote:
> > Samuel AU said:
> >>Hi all,
> >>
> >>I issued the following command in crontab. However, the light of
> >> my hard drive on every 1 to 2 seconds. It seems doesn't work.
> >> So, how can I spin down the hard drive every 3 minutes?
> >
> > man hdparm
> >
> > hdparm -S36 ...
> >
> > 3 minutes = 180 seconds = 36, 5 second intervals
>
> Yes, but after ALL activity is done.  I suspect the dirty cache
> flush is preventing the spindown.


You're correct. Google for "noflushd" or check freshmeat.net. It's a 
daemon that fixes this problem.

Regards,

John