[mythtv-users] Spinning down drives to save power
Rick Hudson
rick at kpo.org.nz
Sun Jun 22 00:02:47 UTC 2008
Tim Sawyer wrote:
> I just found this on the wiki:
>
> http://mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Spindown_drives
>
> What's the advantages of doing it this way over using hdparm to do it? Should
> I do this on an XFS file system? I have a combined front/backend.
I don't think there's an advantage but hdparm -S only works on ATA interfaces.
If you have, for example, SCSI or USB drives then some management software
is required to schedule the "sg_start --stop" (spin down immediately) command.
I seem to recall that on recent versions of Linux, hdparm -S doesn't even work
on ATA drives because of the change in control path. e.g. on my Ubuntu 8.04
backend the media drive is an ATAPI drive but Ubuntu sees it as /dev/sda and
must be controlled using the SCSI interface.
Also, you'll have a hard time getting your OS drive to spin down on a typical
mythtv backend system (in my experience anyway).
I found the easiest way to spin down the drive on a front+back-end system is
to run the OS from a flash disk and use something like your link suggests to
spin down the media drive.
--
Rick Hudson
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