Can you make drives spin / power down

[Trune]

Hi all,

i have a few different usb drives connected to my sheevaplug.

i have a freeagent (which seems to have kown issues with spin down on linux)
and a samsung story station.

with windows these devices will spin down, and pretty much totally power off. (lights off etc) but on my sheevaplug they do spin down i think, but the lights dont go off.

is there a way i can make it power down properly like it would with windows?

thanks.

[dattaway]

Look into the hdparm utility.  It allows control of the hard drive's lower level functions.

[creeble]

Look into the hdparm utility.  It allows control of the hard drive's lower level functions.

You'll probably want sdparm -- hdparm is for IDE devices, sdparm is generally for SATA (most these days).

Eric.

[nolp]

Look at this, it worked for me:

http://hartvig.de/2009/howto-automatically-spin-down-external-usb-hard-drives-in-ubuntu/

This isn't Ubuntu-specific, i use Gentoo.

[snake]

Look at this, it worked for me:

http://hartvig.de/2009/howto-automatically-spin-down-external-usb-hard-drives-in-ubuntu/

This isn't Ubuntu-specific, i use Gentoo.

This is perfect, thanks.

[Trune]

Ok thanks. this is the spin down side of things,

but how about the what seems to be more power efficiant power down? Where the drive seems to actually shut down and lights go off from the caddy?

I imagine this involves turning off the usb port, but is it possible?

[hansan]

I use hd-idle http://hd-idle.sourceforge.net/ to spin down my USB harddisk. I have the impression that the disk is quite deep in the power save mode. I am happy with it.
But this tool uses basically the same SCSI layer calls as sdparm (SCSI Disk Parm and not SATA Disk Parm), so it can be very well that the power save performance is the same.. and not what you are looking for.