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

Simon Hobson linux at thehobsons.co.uk
Fri Jan 2 07:51:02 UTC 2009


Owen B. Mehegan 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.

If your system is booted from these drives then they will not stay 
off for long - Unix/Linux/etc systems tend to be fairly chatty and 
write to the disk quite frequently - even when idle. You can try 
tracking down and 'educating' whichever programs are doing it on a 
truly idle system (with Debian for example, there is a "mark" entry 
written to syslog periodically) - good luck ! There may well be some 
tuning you can do (for example tweaking settings for when a dirty 
cache is flushed), but it's not something I've any first hand 
experience with.

Unless you can get the disks to spin down and stay down for 
reasonable periods of time, then the wear and tear of stopping and 
starting may well exceed the savings from spinning down in the first 
place.

-- 
Simon Hobson

Visit http://www.magpiesnestpublishing.co.uk/ for books by acclaimed
author Gladys Hobson. Novels - poetry - short stories - ideal as
Christmas stocking fillers. Some available as e-books.


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list