How to turn off the HDD? How to reduce the overall noise?

[C. Ulrich]

On Mon, 2003-10-06 at 14:49, Eric Dillenseger wrote:
> BTW, turning it off is almost useless, as there's often a little
> activity on most *real* OS so reducing noise is better (in fact it
> reduces the spinning speed during heavy operations).
> Just my 2cts.

There's also the case where you might want to shut down a drive which is
rarely used. Such as the case with a Slackware box of mine. One drive in
it is dedicated to backing up some important stuff on the others, so
it's only needed once a day. My init scripts have a line (using hdparm)
that completely shuts off the drive after everything's booted up. At the
appropriate time, the backup script runs from cron, and the mounting of
the disk tells the kernel to spin the drive back up. (Usually takes
about 10 seconds.) Once the backup procedure is complete, it runs hdparm
again to shut the disk off again.

I don't know that powering one drive down saves a ton of money in
electricity, or makes the box much quieter, but I figure it has to be
saving some wear and tear on a disk that gets accessed maybe a maximum
of 30 minutes a day. When I convert the machine to FreeBSD, (one of
those when-I-get-around-to-it projects) I'd like to be able to do the
same thing, so I'll look for the IBM utility and bug this list some more
if it doesn't work out or if I can't find it. :)

Charles Ulrich
-- 
http://bityard.net