I've got all my music and video on a separate hard drive, so for the majority of the time when I'm not actually listening or watching anything I want it to spin down for reduced noise.
In SuSE 10.0 it was enough to write "hdparm -S 180 /dev/sdb" into /etc/init.d/boot.local. In OpenSuSE 12.3 that no longer works; the drive never spins down. I conclude that either (1) some process keeps accessing the drive at intervals shorter than a quarter-hour, or else (2) the -S setting is re-set by some distribution-provided process that I'm unaware of.
(1) seems less likely to me - the only system process I know that would spontaneously access an arbitrary, user-defined top-level directory is updatedb, and that runs only once per day. Also, it seems that when I run the hdparm command as root manually from a terminal, then the disk will eventually spin down.
Unfortunately, the -S option apparently can only be set, not queried, so I can't be certain my problem is (2). But if it is, what subsystem/daemon/distribution service might be messing with my hdparm settings?
- some power management service defined by SuSE?
- I'm not running smartd, which is often named as a culprit for this.
- I am running KDE, which I wasn't before (I used OLVWM)
In SuSE 10.0 it was enough to write "hdparm -S 180 /dev/sdb" into /etc/init.d/boot.local. In OpenSuSE 12.3 that no longer works; the drive never spins down. I conclude that either (1) some process keeps accessing the drive at intervals shorter than a quarter-hour, or else (2) the -S setting is re-set by some distribution-provided process that I'm unaware of.
(1) seems less likely to me - the only system process I know that would spontaneously access an arbitrary, user-defined top-level directory is updatedb, and that runs only once per day. Also, it seems that when I run the hdparm command as root manually from a terminal, then the disk will eventually spin down.
Unfortunately, the -S option apparently can only be set, not queried, so I can't be certain my problem is (2). But if it is, what subsystem/daemon/distribution service might be messing with my hdparm settings?
- some power management service defined by SuSE?
- I'm not running smartd, which is often named as a culprit for this.
- I am running KDE, which I wasn't before (I used OLVWM)