[mythtv-users] Spinning down drives to save power

[genestapp at charter.net]

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 wrote the wiki entry.
Advantages of the spindown program: 
1. easily configurable by hardcoded drive id instead of possible changing drive assignment (eg. /dev/sdb1). For me this is a big deal as I have a lot of drives and hotswap
2. config file is easy to change and add drives to.
3. There is a status command so you can see status of your current drives with a listing of whether it is spun down, active and how many seconds the drive has been inactive. 

I set all the drive mounts I use with spindown to noatime in fstab. With spindown, I currently only use it on raided drives that store video. My system disk and two 1tb raid 0 drives that are used for myth are not set to spindown (I have a total of 13 hard drives so 10 spin down after 2 hours idle). I may see about spinning the two myth drives down as that would save an extra 12 to 20 watts, but I had problems in the past of getting 0 byte files when the recordings drive(s) were spundown due to the time delay in them spinning up and syncing.

Gene