Thread: My system does not put the hard drive in a low power state.

Hi:
It is always spinning. Why is that? Thanks.

Yes, it is called spindown and not all hard drives supports it. Some time it is kernel and driver issue too. For example Seagate barracuda XT models with 64M cache supports spin down but other hard disk in same model does not supports it. Do you know make and model of your hard disk?

Originally Posted by nixcraft

Yes, it is called spindown and not all hard drives supports it. Some time it is kernel and driver issue too. For example Seagate barracuda XT models with 64M cache supports spin down but other hard disk in same model does not supports it. Do you know make and model of your hard disk?

Thank you for your reply. At boot time the BIOS displays
Primary Master: RM100-10 SAMSUNG SV4012H
Primary Slave: 15.15M15 WDC WD100EB-00BHF0

One thing I can say is that under MS-DOS version 5.00, the disks stop spinning after some period of inactivity on the keyboard. As DOS 5.00 knows nothing about ACPI, it is obviously the BIOS who stops the hard disks.

Yes, I believe SATA / SAS drives handle their own spindown features but it is kernel and/or other services who keep accessing hard disk. Most distro supports laptop mode and I think this can be applied to Slackware too. Another option is hdparm:

Code:

hdparm -S245 /dev/hda

Thank you very much. BTW when I issue 'hdparm -B xxx', where xxx is a number, I get an I/O error. Why is that?
P.S.: GNU/linux kernel 2.6, slackware 12.0, hdparm v7.6.