How can I control HDD spin down time?
I have 2 HDDs in my PC. Ubuntu is turning off the secondary HDD very quickly after about 15 minutes, which is short for me. I need to control this time. How can I do it?
I tried GNOME power management but did not find it useful.
Solution 1:
Have a look at hdparm
.
From the manual (man hdparm
on the command line):
-S Put the drive into idle (low-power) mode, and also set the standby (spindown)
timeout for the drive. This timeout value is used by the drive to determine how
long to wait (with no disk activity) before turning off the spindle motor to save
power. Under such circumstances, the drive may take as long as 30 seconds to
respond to a subsequent disk access, though most drives are much quicker. The
encoding of the timeout value is somewhat peculiar. A value of zero means
"timeouts are disabled": the device will not automatically enter standby mode.
Values from 1 to 240 specify multiples of 5 seconds, yielding timeouts from 5
seconds to 20 minutes. Values from 241 to 251 specify from 1 to 11 units of 30
minutes, yielding timeouts from 30 minutes to 5.5 hours. A value of 252 signifies
a timeout of 21 minutes. A value of 253 sets a vendor-defined timeout period
between 8 and 12 hours, and the value 254 is reserved. 255 is interpreted as 21
minutes plus 15 seconds. Note that some older drives may have very different
interpretations of these values.
So:
sudo hdparm -I /dev/sdb | grep level
will show the current spindown value, for example:
Advanced power management level: 254
From the manual, 254 is reserved, so I expect it to be Ubuntu's default (can anyone confirm/expand on this please?).
Example:
-
sudo hdparm -S 25 /dev/sdb
= spindown after 25*5 seconds. -
sudo hdparm -S 245 /dev/sdb
= spindown after (245-240)*30 minutes.
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:
Solution 3:
If you're interested on do the hdparm's setting persistent between reboots, instead of adding it to the crontab, you can use the /etc/hdparm.conf
. I have the following, note the use of capital S, not lowercase:
command_line {
hdparm -S 25 /dev/disk/by-uuid/f6c52265-d89f-43a4-b03b-302c3dadb215
}
Add that line replacing the UUID by yours, or also you may specify the device using /dev/sdX
format. You can find out your disk's UUID with the command sudo blkid
.
Solution 4:
-
Find your disk's UUID.
sudo lsblk --output NAME,FSTYPE,LABEL,UUID,MODE
-
Edit
/etc/hdparm.conf
sudo -H gedit /etc/hdparm.conf # Be careful from now on
-
Look for
spindown-time
or your disk settings section./dev/disk/by-label/4TB { spindown_time = 1200 }
-
I prefer to refer to the disk by UUID which remains the same across different installations (unless you change it in the HW itself).
/dev/disk/by-uuid/91e32677-0656-45b8-bcf5-14acce39d9c2 { spindown_time = 1200 }
If the init script causes boot problems, you can pass
nohdparm
on the kernel command line, and the script will not be run.