How can I find out the current drive spin-down time?

I'm interested in manually adjusting my hard drives' spin-down times with hdparm -S to make them quieter at night. The first thing I need to know is what their current spin-down times are, to use as a reference point and so I know what kind of changes I can expect.

Where can I look up this information?

Details

I am not asking how to look up the current Advanced Power Management setting (hdparm -B).

Solution 1:

According to the ATA/ATAPI-7 V1 (the specification that manufacturers should follow to be ATA compliant), there is no way to know the current spin down times, so hdparm wouldn't be able to. marc-andre solution only tries to determine whenever the drive can spin down and the spin up times:

udisks --show-info /dev/sdb | grep spin
    can spindown:              1
===============================================================================
 Attribute       Current|Worst|Threshold  Status   Value       Type     Updates
===============================================================================
 spin-up-time                205|203| 63   good    17.3 secs   Pre-fail Online 
 spin-retry-count            253|252|157   good    0           Pre-fail Online 
 spin-high-current           253|252|  0    n/a    0           Old-age  Online 
 spin-buzz                   253|252|  0    n/a    0           Old-age  Online

You can only know if a drive is currently active or not using hdparm -C

sudo hdparm -C /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
 drive state is:  active/idle

Solution 2:

Disk Utility -> select HDD drive -> click on the "More actions..." icon on the top right corner -> Drive settings...

Mine is looks like this: screenshot

Solution 3:

I was interested in finding this out myself. I created a quick and dirty script for measuring spindown. It works on intervals of SECONDS from uptime, and you can specify which disk(s) and intervals to use. It logs results to ~/sleepdata.log It only uses hdparm and uptime. It probably has bugs too.

DL @ https://gitorious.org/check-disk-spindown/sh/raw/chkspindown.sh

Solution 4:

I've just created a script / cron job for this:

https://github.com/izznogooood/log-spindown

With the combination of this and @Ray s answer you should find your threshold.