HDDs disable spindown

[Dmitri Varenov]

Good day!

Guys, once again i have to rely on your help and knowledge :-)

I prefer to keep my HDDs spinning all the time and had no problem with my previous WD drives, just setting "Spindown" to 0 in Disk --> Utilities was enough.

But after changing the drives to Seagate IronWolf i'm having a problem with HDDs spinning down in less than 5 minutes after activity and spontaneously wake up.

Also, as you can see on the screenshot, the "Power Saving" column is grayed-out 

I tried to do the following but no effect. Drives are continuing to spindown:

1. Manually disable the spindown by "hdparm -S0 /dev/sd<b,c>" - no error in console but no effect either

2. Manually disable APM by "hdparm -B255 /dev/sd<b,c>" - Command gives an error: "/sdb: setting APM level to disabled 0xFF (255) hdparm: HDIO_DRIVE_CMD: Input/output error

3.There is also an option to disable Seagate auto-powersaving mode so i tried this one too: Same Input/output error

I'd be really appreciated for any ideas or suggestions what else i should try. Thank you very much for your time.

[Joao Cardoso]

You can try also 'smartctl' get/set options (get: -g, set: -s), try 'smartctl -g /dev/sda'  to see what you can set.

But if hdparm settings are not honored, then this will also probably fail.

Modern drives have their own power-saving thoughts or needs, and they apply them on the "user's best interest" -- like as a benevolent dictatorship :-?

Disabling spindown should be very easy, just keep writing to the drives at regular intervals, using 'cron'. Eg, Services->System, cron, Configure, and add an entry with '*' '*:*' '/bin/date > /mnt/sda/keep-awake' for the When At Command.

This will write the current date to sda every minute, keeping it awake.

You can also use 'crontab' from the command line (but notice that the box busybox crontab does not support all crontab options)

Keep an eye on the drive temperature, as it can have been designed expecting the drive to be in standby most of the time.