HDD spinup when in sleep mode, strange behaviour

[komodo]

Hi

I have noticed some strange behavioir on my system. After some upgrade, i
don't know exactly when, maybe one or two weeks ago, my drive which is in
sleep state wakes up everytime when some process access it.
To be clear, here is my config.

I have two HDDs, one is main disk where is the system, data and so on, and
second where is backup. Second disk is put in the sleep mode right after
system start with hdparm

hdparm. conf

/dev/sdb {
spindown_time = 10
}

Everything works fine, but now, every 30min i hear that disk is spined up, and
after ten seconds is spinned down. So i thought that the problem is in the
smartd, which check disks every 30min's, but it isn't, becase even if i run

hdparm -C /dev/sdb

the drive is spinned up again.

And it's annoying, because before upgrade it was ok, and disk was spin up only
after some access, fdisk, or mount or so.

Can someone tell me where the problem can be ? Or test it ?

A can't find any bug report about this behaviour. And i don't want fill new
bugreport if i'm not sure that it's really bug and not some
missconfiguration.

Thanks

Martin

--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-us...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listm...@lists.debian.org

[green]

komodo wrote at 2009-05-02 13:01 -0600:
> Everything works fine, but now, every 30min i hear that disk is spined up, and
> after ten seconds is spinned down. So i thought that the problem is in the
> smartd, which check disks every 30min's, but it isn't, becase even if i run
>
> hdparm -C /dev/sdb
>
> the drive is spinned up again.

I don't understand how the hdparm command proves that smartd isn't spinning up
the disk; you may want to check on the -n option in smartctl(8).

> And it's annoying, because before upgrade it was ok, and disk was spin up only
> after some access, fdisk, or mount or so.

You probably want to use the "noatime" mount option (see mount(8)) for all
filesystems on the disk (if you are not already).

[komodo]

On Sunday 03 of May 2009 04:31:57 green wrote:
> komodo wrote at 2009-05-02 13:01 -0600:
> > Everything works fine, but now, every 30min i hear that disk is spined
> > up, and after ten seconds is spinned down. So i thought that the problem
> > is in the smartd, which check disks every 30min's, but it isn't, becase
> > even if i run
> >
> > hdparm -C /dev/sdb
> >
> > the drive is spinned up again.
>
> I don't understand how the hdparm command proves that smartd isn't spinning
> up the disk; you may want to check on the -n option in smartctl(8).

Thanks for answer, i don't know how it is doing but it works before upgrade.
And i found some bugs about this so it seems that problem is in hdparm
package.

See

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=522091

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=526516

Martin

>
> > And it's annoying, because before upgrade it was ok, and disk was spin up
> > only after some access, fdisk, or mount or so.
>
> You probably want to use the "noatime" mount option (see mount(8)) for all
> filesystems on the disk (if you are not already).

--

[green]

komodo wrote at 2009-05-06 02:02 -0500:
> On Sunday 03 of May 2009 04:31:57 green wrote:
> > komodo wrote at 2009-05-02 13:01 -0600:
> > > Everything works fine, but now, every 30min i hear that disk is spined
> > > up, and after ten seconds is spinned down. So i thought that the problem
> > > is in the smartd, which check disks every 30min's, but it isn't, becase
> > > even if i run
> > >
> > > hdparm -C /dev/sdb
> > >
> > > the drive is spinned up again.
> >
> > I don't understand how the hdparm command proves that smartd isn't spinning
> > up the disk; you may want to check on the -n option in smartctl(8).
>
> Thanks for answer, i don't know how it is doing but it works before upgrade.
> And i found some bugs about this so it seems that problem is in hdparm
> package.
>
> See
>
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=522091
>
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=526516

Hmm, interesting. This may be one reason why I too have had trouble getting
disks to spin down and remain on standby.

[komodo]

Sure it is, but i'm courious when it will be fixed. Now i have disabled smartd
so it's ok, but it's bad without smartd.

Martin