Spin down disks - no longer working

[stevea]

One of the nice features of recent Fedoras is that the power managers allows you to spin-down disks when unused. This has been a real power/heat/noise savings.

However sometime in the past few weeks this feature has ceased to work as expected. I have a backup drive (/dev/sdc) this is only used for one period at night, and the normally when I do an "ls -l /backup' (the mountpoint) in the day the drive has to spinup for 3-5 seconds before I get a result. No longer the case - it's always spinning.

In XFCE power manager, under the "On AC" tab, I have the "Spin down hard disks" checked.
In the past that was all it took.

Sadly as with the corresponding Gnome power manager there is no way to debug or monitor this that I am aware of.

Anyone else seeing this ?
Time for bugzilla ?

[szilagyic]

I've also noticed this behavior, in Gnome 3 on Fedora 17. I've set the Power Options to spin down the disks, however it doesn't seem to actually spin them down. I've also tried to see how power management is handled and have not had any luck yet either getting it to actually work. This used to work fine in Gnome 2.x on Fedora 14. If you figure this out I think it will benefit others with the same issue.

[Dan]

Ayup. Bugzilla time.

[stevea]

It's been reported.

FWIW szilagyic, this feature did work in early F17 packages.

Note that a drive that is mounted as root will likely never spin down since there is regular log activity (to /var/log for example).

[droidhacker]

You can use 'hdparm -S60 /dev/sdBLAH'. I.e., throw a list of this command into your /etc/rc.d/rc.local script to enable it on boot.

Funny thing that I noticed, is that setting the spin down time too high and the damned thing wouldn't spin down any more!!!!

-S60 is 5 minutes. When I had it set to -S180, it wouldn't spin down ever.


Edit: Note that some laptop disks are weird with the spindown thing. They may not support "-S". The western digital laptop disk I recently retired in favor of an SSD used a combination of "-B" (value of 1-127 inclusive allows spin down), and "-J" (western digital "green" idle3 timeout, in seconds -- stupid thing defaulted to 8 seconds, which is absurdly low, permitted values 8-12 seconds or 30-300 seconds in 30-second increments)

[PabloTwo]

Using the hdparm command in the rc.local file is what I've been doing on my desktop pc with F16 for quite some time.

BASH:~/-> cat /etc/rc.d/rc.local 
#!/bin/bash
# Add commands to run at system startup

/sbin/hdparm -S 120 /dev/sdb /dev/sdc

This works 100% of the time on sdb and ~95% of the time for sdc (1TB storage only drive).

BASH:~/-> sensorstats
Core 0:    +35.0°C
Core 1:    +32.0°C
Core 2:    +29.0°C
Core 3:    +32.0°C
CPUFAN2:    0 RPM
CPUFAN1:    1590 RPM
CHAFAN1:    728 RPM
CHAFAN2:    661 RPM
CHAFAN3:    675 RPM
SYSTEM:    +33.0°C 
CPUTEM:    +31.5°C 
GPUTEM:    +31.0°C
GPUFAN:    40%
/dev/sdb:  sleeping
/dev/sdc:  sleeping
/dev/sda:  +35.0°C