[mythtv-users] Hard-drive spindown when idle?

[f-myth-users at media.mit.edu]

Ubuntu in particular also has a cronjob called "standard" in
cron.daily that will spin up every disk with a filesystem on
it, once a day, in order to see if there are any files in
lost+found.  I commented out the half of the file that does
this so disks wouldn't get needlessly spun up every 24 hours.

I wouldn't be surprised if other Debian-based distros did, this,
too.  It's been in Ubuntu since at least 5.04 (5 years ago) and
probably longer.  I think this behavior is questionable at best.

[There's some other thing in Ubuntu---might be smartd, I forget---
that at least has the brains to use hdparm -C to check the drive
before blindly querying it; the -C means the drive will come out of
sleep into standby, but -shouldn't- spin all the way up, though I'm
told that some do anyway.  But standard isn't that smart and just
spins everything up without checking.]