[linux-lvm] Spinning down/up drives.

[Anders Widman]

> On Sun, 2 Jun 2002 09:48, you wrote:
>> I can not tell who is handling it grecefullt, but I've 6x80GB Maxtor
>> drives, two on one primise controller. I'm running a RAID5 with this
>> drives (linux softraid, aka MD, kernel 2.4.18) with LVM 1.0.x ontop.
>> The LVs are either running ext3 or ReiserFs.
>> The discs are configurated to spindown after 25min of idle time
> How have you managed to do this?  Is this a Maxtor feature? or some driver(s) 
> for Linux?  I've been wanting to do exactly this for some time but have not 
> been able to...  Any pointers or info would be appreciated.

>  and
>> beside some "IDEx resetting drive" error messages the system is stable
>> since about 6 months (the time I assembled it).
>> It's only my home server, but you don't want to have production/work
>> machines spinup their drives first.
> All depends.  On the RAID5 I have running at work & home I have a hot-spare & 
> I have a hdparm -y /dev/hdg in rc.local which puts it to sleep after boot-up 
> as its useless having it spin if its not needed.  NOTE: I have never been 
> able to get hdparm -Y /dev/hdg working on any drive even those that are 
> suppost to support it.  Again any pointers or info would be appreciated.



Use "hdparm -S 242 /dev/hda"

This is taken from the man page:



       -S     Set  the  standby (spindown) timeout for the drive.
              This value is used by the drive  to  determine  how
              long to wait (with no disk activity) before turning
              off the spindle motor to save  power.   Under  such
              circumstances,  the  drive  may  take as long as 30
              seconds to respond to  a  subsequent  disk  access,
              though  most drives are much quicker.  The encoding
              of the timeout value is somewhat peculiar.  A value
              of  zero means "off".  Values from 1 to 240 specify
              multiples of 5 seconds, for timeouts from 5 seconds
              to 20 minutes.  Values from 241 to 251 specify from
              1 to 11 units of 30 minutes, for timeouts  from  30
              minutes  to  5.5 hours.  A value of 252 signifies a
              timeout of 21 minutes, 253  sets  a  vendor-defined
              timeout,  and 255 is interpreted as 21 minutes plus
              15 seconds.

//Anders