HDD does spin down and up again and again

[Steve Riley]

The file /etc/hdparm.conf is your friend.

My ThinkPad has a second HDD in its UltraBay. I use this mainly for storing photos and music. I don't access it very often, so I don't want the drive to spin unless I need it. I've accomplished this by doing two things:

* Omitting an entry in /etc/fstab for the filesystem (/dev/sdb1) on the drive
* Adding an entry to /etc/hdparm.conf that tells the system to power-down the drive after boot

That entry is the following:

   /dev/sdb {
      apm = 127
      apm_battery = 127
   }

"man hdparm.conf" will tell you more about this configuration file. For the actual values to set, consult "man hdparm"; here, you will learn that 127 is the value to use for immediate power-down.

I also intentionally omitted an entry for /dev/sdb1 in /etc/fstab. Instead, I rely on Udisks to take care of automounting for me.

The end result is perfect. When I boot the computer, I can hear the drive spin only for a few seconds until init parses /etc/hdparm.conf and powers the drive down. The drive stays quiet until I really want it -- there are no random touches, which is what I think you want to prevent.

Opening Dolphin will *not* power up the drive. When I click the drive in the "Places" pane, Udisks applies power and mounts the drive. Once I'm finished with it, the drive powers back down quickly (because my APM setting is aggressive at 127).

...Steve


On 2013-11-27 at 10:35, Ralf Mardorf <kde.lists at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Hi :)
> 
> some days ago I started testing KDE, being a long time Linux user, running 
> Xfce for the last years.
> 
> KDE does touch without any reason my "green" HDD, so 193 Load_Cycle_Count does 
> increase for nothing.
> 
> When I experienced the same issue with other DEs I removed gvfs, in case it 
> was an optional dependencies or replaced gvfs with an empty dummy package when 
> it was a hard dependency, to get rid of this HDD killer.
> 
> It's neither possible to disable the "green" option, nor do I want to disable 
> it, assumed it should be possible. The order to spin down external drives 
> after a while is one of the EU Regulation that are ok. Touching the drive for 
> nothing simply is a bug.
> 
> As a command line user, there's no need for me to see Trash and removable 
> devices on the Desktop or by Dolphin.
> 
> My all day distro is Arch Linux, but I'm testing KDE with Kubuntu Saucy. What 
> do I need to remove, to get rid of the HDD killer for the KDE install?
> 
> I'll ask at KDE mailing list too, but since the traffic on this and the KDE list 
> is very low, I "cross-post" this request.
> 
> Regards,
> Ralf