[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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