How to control the spin down time of a hard drive?
The encoding of the timeout value is somewhat peculiar. A value of zero means “timeouts are disabled”: the device will not automatically enter standby mode. Values from 1 to 240 specify multiples of 5 seconds, yielding timeouts from 5 seconds to 20 minutes.
How can I enable spinning down of idle hard disks?
Every time you page from VM, you’ll generate a disk I/O. Supressing your VM as much as possible will help with this regard. If you can take it to the extreme (you have like 3-4Gb of RAM) you can just disable swap partitions and files altogether, and this issue will go away.
Why does ext3 spin down disk when there is no activity?
Some disks do spin down if there is no activity (e.g. WD Caviar). At first, you should mount your partitions with ‘relatime’ to optimize ext3’s behavior. Then find out what is accessing your disks (logfiles?). I think you’re not talking about your root partition or another system disk but rather a optional storage you write to/read from manually?
How often should I spin my hard disk?
There are actually lots of files that have active writes at any time…mostly logs… There are some considerations as well. If you spin the drive down too many times, it will die in less than a year. So you’ll want to keep a careful eye on how often it does spin up.
Is there a sleep timer on a HDD?
These hard drives do not have any sleep timer setting. But you can adjust this for your computer. You can go to “power options” in you control panel. That is incorrect, please research the answer more thoroughly. Each and every HDD mfg today has an internal power-down timer as part of the APM specification.
What are the values for spin down time?
Values from 241 to 251 specify from 1 to 11 units of 30 minutes, yielding timeouts from 30 minutes to 5.5 hours. A value of 252 signifies a timeout of 21 minutes.
What do I do when my hard drive goes down?
Click on the ‘Change advanced power settings’ link. Under ‘Hard disk’ you’ll find ‘Turn off hard disk after’. This is where you can control if and when the hard drives will power down after a period of inactivity.