Question

15

Setting SATA HDD spindown time for Western Digital Green drives

rated 0 times [ 15] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 33532 / 1 Year ago, sat, march 18, 2023, 1:11:36

I am able to spindown my SATA HDDs by using

sudo hdparm -y /dev/sdc

The state shown by

sudo hdparm -C /dev/sdc

changes from active/idle to standby (and I can hear the HDD spin down).

However, using

sudo hdparm -S5 /dev/sdc

doesn't spin down the drive after 5*5 = 25secs.

Some additional information:

AHCI is enabled.

I am using Western Digital Green drives.

APM_level = not supported

Filesystem is ext4

Edit: This question is not a duplicate to How can I control HDD spin down time? because it addresses Western Digital Green drives, which will not work with hdparm.

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tersle

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2 Years ago

answered 1 Year ago neasinient · Accepted Answer

After more research, it seems that the -B and -S options of hdparm just doesn't work with certain Western Digital (and maybe other) drives.

This includes my WD10EADS, WD10EACS and WD20EARX.

I found a solution: hd-idle

To install hd-idle on Ubuntu:

wget https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/hd-idle/hd-idle-1.04.tgz

tar xvfz hd-idle*.tgz

cd hd-idle

sudo apt-get install debhelper

sudo dpkg-buildpackage -uc -us -rfakeroot

cd ..

sudo dpkg -i hd-idle_*.deb

# To run at startup:

sudo update-rc.d hd-idle defaults

nano /etc/default/hd-idle

/etc/default/hd-idle content:

START_HD_IDLE=true

# Optional, to limit to a specific drives:

# (leading '-i 0' to disable hd-idle on other disks)

HD_IDLE_OPTS="-i 0 -a /dev/disk/by-uuid/DRIVE1UID -i 600 -a /dev/disk/by-uuid/DRIVE2UID -i 600"

Disable system-managed disk power management settings in Storage > Physical Disks > Disk properties (redundant).

sudo service hd-idle start

Check:

sudo hdparm -C /dev/sd[a-z]