Re: spinning down hard disk
On Wed, 10 Oct 2007 04:32:52 +0000, sulekha wrote:
[color=blue]
> Hi all,
>
> I was reading the book "Beginning Ubuntu Linux" by thomas keir. In
> this book there
> is a tip given to spin down the hard disk. the author says that it
> will help a lot in power savings.
>
> he gives the tip as follows
>
> all modern hard disks come with the ability to spin down their motors
> to save energy.Then,when data is requested,the motors spin up again.
> There may be a slight delay while this happens, and some people
> dislike using disk spin-down because of this. However on a notebook,
> it can lead to a substantial increase in battery life.On a desktop
> system ,it's worth considering.because over the lifetime of a
> computer, it can save a lot of electricity.
>
> on terminal type
> gksu gedit /etc/hdparm.conf
>
> spindown_time=24
>
> you can alter the value to anything you want.each time unit is 5
> seconds,so 24 equates to 120 seconds or 2 minutes
>
> when u are finished,save the file.
>
> Reboot for the settings to take effect
>
> Now question is how effective is this tip ???
> will it lead to substantial power savings?????[/color]
Why not try it and find out? Or ask in alt.os.linux.ubuntu, where you'll
get answered by people who are using Ubuntu and know a lot about it.
--
Kier
Re: spinning down hard disk
sulekha :[color=blue]
> Hi all,
>
> I was reading the book "Beginning Ubuntu Linux" by thomas keir. In
> this book there
> is a tip given to spin down the hard disk. the author says that it
> will help a lot in power savings.
>
> he gives the tip as follows
>
> all modern hard disks come with the ability to spin down their motors
> to save energy.Then,when data is requested,the motors spin up again.
> There may be a slight delay while this happens, and some people
> dislike using disk spin-down because of this. However on a notebook,
> it can lead to a substantial increase in battery life.On a desktop
> system ,it's worth considering.because over the lifetime of a
> computer, it can save a lot of electricity.
>
> on terminal type
> gksu gedit /etc/hdparm.conf
>
> spindown_time=24
>
> you can alter the value to anything you want.each time unit is 5
> seconds,so 24 equates to 120 seconds or 2 minutes[/color]
Yep. From the man page:
-S
Set the standby (spindown) timeout for the drive. This value
is used by the drive to determine how long to wait (with no
disk activity) before turning off the spindle motor to save
power. Under such circumstances, the drive may take as long
as 30 seconds to respond to a subsequent disk access, though
most drives are much quicker. The encoding of the timeout
value is somewhat peculiar. A value of zero means "timeouts
are disabled": the device will not automatically enter standby
mode. Values from 1 to 240 specify multiples of 5 seconds,
yielding timeouts from 5 seconds to 20 minutes. Values from
241 to 251 specify from 1 to 11 units of 30 minutes, yielding
timeouts from 30 minutes to 5.5 hours. A value of 252 signi-
fies a timeout of 21 minutes. A value of 253 sets a vendor-
defined timeout period between 8 and 12 hours, and the value
254 is reserved. 255 is interpreted as 21 minutes plus 15
seconds. Note that some older drives may have very different
interpretations of these values.
so the command:
# hdparm -S 24 /dev/[hs]d[abcd]
will set the spindown for those drives to two minutes or whatever.
Ubuntu probably has the file /etc/hdparm.conf for reference by startup
scripts. Slackware doesn't use that so I can't confim that it'll work
for you.
[color=blue]
> when u are finished,save the file.
>
> Reboot for the settings to take effect
>
> Now question is how effective is this tip ???
> will it lead to substantial power savings?????[/color]
It could. For example I have four HDs on my machine, only two of which I
access frequently. It'd probably ba a Good Thing to spin down the ones I
dont use.
--
You LIVE in that head?
[url]http://www.websterscafe.com[/url]
