Hello,
On Fri, 11 May 2012, Neil Bothwick wrote:
>On Thu, 10 May 2012 17:53:27 -0500, Paul Hartman wrote:
>> On my HDDs, I cannot disable APM but I can disable spindown by
>> changing the power-saving level to 254. I have a script in
>> /etc/local.d/ which calls:
>
>You don't need a script, add the options you need to /etc/conf.d/hdparm
>and add hdparm to the default runlevel.
>
>> hdparm -B 254 /dev/sd[abcdef]
>
>That doesn't work with my WD WD20EARX drives, which just report APM
>disabled when I run it.
Oh boy, we did get confused in this thread, did we?
RTFM hdparm.
a) Disk APM has usually only 3 settings, and only controls the
"agressiveness" or the speed of how seeks are done, i.e. how fast
the head moves seeking from track to track.
0-127 slow
128-254 fast
255 default
At least some manufacturers disable this (IIRC e.g. Seagate,
lock it to "slow" on the "green" disks and fast on enterprise.
b) spindown is a totally unrelated feature, which is can be set by
using 'hdparm -S'. I have about 20 disks in two boxen, one of them
a WD 20xxEARS, and _NONE_ spin down (until shutdown).
Have a look into your /etc/pm-profiler/{YOUR_PROFILE} (not sure if
that's gentoo standard, I only have a very minimal gentoo
installed). I've e.g. copied the "Balanced Low Latency" profile but
set
SATA_ALPM="max_performance"
In the "powersaving" you get
SATA_ALPM="min_power"
which sets (via hdparm -S) the disks to spindown after whatever
seconds (20s? I don't know).
Anyway, there is some stuff setting disk-spindown timeouts. So, choose
and/or adjust pm/upower config and/or set spindown time via 'hdparm
-S', with pm-profiler, upower, init-script, whatever.
BTW: 'hdparm -S 0' disables spindown.
HTH,
-dnh, with a seriously outdated gentoo installed only in parallel, but
I have a lot of disks and know hdparm a bit ;)
--
When the SysAdmin answers the phone politely, say "sorry", hang up and
run awaaaaay!
Informal advice to users at Karolinska Institutet, 1993-1994
