[mythtv-users] Spinning down drives in a RAID 1

[John Drescher]

On Thu, Jan 1, 2009 at 9:22 PM, Owen B. Mehegan <owen at nerdnetworks.org> wrote:
> I have Myth running on a Debian system with one massive bootable RAID
> 1 filesystem for everything. I'm using two 700G SATA drives, and they
> run quite hot. I don't actually record live TV from this system, it's
> just an MP3 and AVI video player which sits idle for most of the day.
> It seems like if I were to spin down the drives when they're idle, I
> could save power and prolong their life at the same time.
>
> I've read this page on the MythTV wiki: http://mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Spindown_drives
>   It doesn't mention RAID though. Are there any pitfalls to trying to
> implement this on my RAID 1 system, or can I just treat it like a pair
> of disks and go for it?
>
You could try using hdparm on each disk. I am doing that although not
on raid which I am getting rid of on my myth system so all disks but
the single os disk will spin down. Either way I still am fighting
mythtv from waking the drives up every 15 minutes or so. The suggested
fix of disabling upnp did not work for me however I am not running
trunk as one of the devs suggested.

I have this in my startup script.
hdparm -S 243 /dev/sda
hdparm -S 243 /dev/sdb
hdparm -S 243 /dev/sdc

The nice thing about this method is the drive does the spin down itself.

John