Hd-idle

[Keith Cogswell]

Note: If you manually installed hd-idle and now you want to use the repo, just uninstall the package and start over. The config file should not be removed, but always make a copy before uninstalling.

You may still want to use a short spin-down time if you have a very very very inactive drive such as a SnapRAID parity drive that is woken up only once per day for the sync job. If this is the case, you can further customize the configuration by using disk UUID or label. Do not use device name (eg:/dev/sda1) because they can change and things can get messy.

Hi, I have bunch of WD drives, which seem to ignore hdparm -S command. It is actually a known bug of many WD drives. So I compiled hd-idle package from -idle.sourceforge.net/ (make & make install went fine) and it installed into /usr/local/sbin/hd-idle

But when I try to run it as service, it exits with code 0, but does not stay running and it does not power down disks. What is the difference between running command from .service file and from command line? Is there some hidden magic in maybe service type? Why it does not stay resident?

Hi, thank you again for help, I added the repo and hd-idle got installeg using zypper It does not create hd-idle service in /etc/systemd/system/hd-idle.service though, but once executed with -n parameter, it does not flood journal with debug messages anymore.
This /etc/systemd/system/hd-idle.service works:

Btw. the version 1.5 compiled from source installs into /usr/local/sbin (make install), which I have deleted already, but the opensuse v1.4 installs into /usr/sbin, so I believe your update will work fine. If it overwrites the .service file, I will have to move the parameters to the newly proposed /etc/sysconfig/hd-idle, right?

In the meantime I downloaded the rpm from X0F repo via wget and it looks like it works. Only it ignores options in yast config, I had to edit directly /etc/default/hd-idle. I cannot confirm the disks are really off though:

Hi,
Disk spin-down: What program to use and best practice today?
There are threads about udisk2, hdparm, hd-idle (malcolmlewis]( -malcolmlewis)). What is the best with Leap 15.3 and how to use it?

After running the script for one HDD, is it possible to mount, start it back without unplug and re-plug it, only by software?
I ask that because at this time, HDDs spinup/spindown at interval. If I unmount them it could avoid this behaviour.

As Mr. chewitt succintly pointed out to use hd-idle, installing the virtual.system-tools addon, to start hd-idle edit the system file: /storage/.config/autostart.sh (so that the needed command is executed after every boot)

Honestly can't believe that this still isn't an standard GUI option, forcing users to edit system files for common place things like this. And that the only near (non working) solution given in 2 years is this thread. Hope that helps future users.

I have added a command that runs "hd-idle". It seems to need to run as root as otherwise it does not spin down the drives as instructed. Behavior seems to be the same when executed manually or via rc.local. hd-idle was compiled with make install as opposed to installed with apt-get if it matters.

Work in Progress! This page is a continuous work in progress. You can edit this page to contribute information. hd-idle Configuration The /etc/config/hd-idle configuration is provided by the hd-idle package. Sections hd-idle This is the...

Either you misunderstood the article or that article was a 100% load of bollocks. That is simply not true, semiconductors don't break from not being used. The data in the flash cells might degrade over time if the device was just sitting unused and unpowered, but that's a big "might" and even then, we are talking about years, not hours or days.

I have never seen any actually credible data on that claim, only projections and misunderstandings. Heck, I just recently checked one of my SSDs that had been lying in the closet for almost a decade and it still retained everything from way back when perfectly intact.

I have seen that with USB sticks (which are admittedly binned from the bottom of the barrel) and an almost unused (under an hour total runtime) new-old-stock SSD (32 GB SATA from Apacer (Phison PS3109S9), which isn't much higher grade) in a cold-spare gateprotect (which had been sitting in its box for 6-7 years). Neither of these were recoverable (cell damage on the USB sticks, on-flash firmware corruption on the Apacer SSD).

Anyways, I am not going to start a religious fight over this or anything and OpenWrt-forums probably ain't the right place for that anyway, but until I see some actual data (not anecdotes or projections) I, personally, won't bother wasting a second of my life worrying about such.

Well remember flash memories are in the factory made in different serving quality grades.
To make it simple SanDisk, Crucial etc are making the actual flash memory chips and at QC the working ones get their names on it and they are very much long time stable.

When I originally setup my old RP3 with OSMC, I compiled and installed hd-idle to do the job for me and it worked really well. Despite searching the forums here, I was surprised there was no step by step guide for compiling and installing hd-idle on the Vero 4K+ so after spending some time yesterday, I got it working nicely.

By default, disks will be spun down after 10 minutes (600 seconds) but you can easily tweak this by editing the config file (see step 9) and adding the following line to the very end of the config file (replacing XXX with however many seconds you want hd-idle to wait before powering down your drives):

But it did not work all the time. Upon first connection it did not spin down manually and it did not spin down automatically. I am not sure what changed the behaviour of the disk. The two things I did in between where:

Btw. my Advanced Power Management-level is 254. (hdparm -B /dev/sdX). I am not sure how APM is related to the spindown time. Normally, a value of 254 should prevent any spindowns. I also read that to enable spindown it should be set to 127 or lower.

I was thinking that maybe HDDs that are manufactured for NAS purposes might suppress spindowns. I posted this answer with additional questionable details to get more insight into the subject from other contributors. I will be glad to update the answer later.

Users of hd-idle have asked for means to set idle-time parameters for individual disks. This makes a lot of sense, not only because some [SCSI] disks may not react well to being stopped. Originally, hd-idle had one idle time for all disks. The parameter "-a" can now be used to set a filter on the disk's device name (omit /dev/) for subsequent idle-time settings.

This example sets the default idle time to 0 (meaning hd-idle will never try to spin down a disk), then sets explicit idle times for disks which have the string "sda" or "sdb" in their device name.Stopping hd-idle

This usually involves the USB-to-SATA controller on the hard drive side of things. Most external USB hard drives' firmware isn't configurable, either, so you can't always set this to be the case. There may be some controllers which can do this, but I know of none that are mainstream USB hard drive devices.

Unfortunately, there's no real way to change this either with just Linux and its basic software, if the controller doesn't already let you make these kinds of changes to settings via its own software suite or something.

Hi everyone,Bit of a beginner with LEI have installed LE on SD card on an amlogic 905X box. Works perfectly, with the exception that the box no longer lets my external HDD go to sleep/idle/spin down (not sure exactly which term to use but it is...

I think hdparm does not support all external disks, it depends on the disk.
I use two external disks connected to USB3 ports of my N2. One is supported by hdparm, the
other gives the same error message as you have seen.

If you have problems with hd-idle from the system-plugin, you can compile it by your own.
You can download the source from -idle.
It is only one binary file, I stored it as /storage/.kodi/userdata/hd-idle
and put the following lines in autostart.sh:

This seems to work perfectly, just what i needed. I still dont get why the unit does not automatically fall to sleep like it does on my pc?. Its really handy as the light then breaths to let you know its asleep.

My understanding (which could also be incorrect) is that when idling, the hard drive platters are spun down. This reduces energy consumption to some degree but allows enough power to continue to be supplied to the drive for it to spring back into action relatively quickly.

Parking is essentially shutting down the hard drive such that it is in more or less the same state that it is when the box is switched off. This means even more energy being saved but when reactivating the disk, it takes longer to spring back into action, which, on occasion, can give the impression that things are slower than normal, but is just the time required to bring the disk back online.

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