Here's the latest update. I've got my drive to enter standby mode for extended periods by mounting all my partitions with the "sync" and "noatime" options. AFAIK, the first option causes data to be flushed to disk synchronously, and the second prevents file access time updates from being flushed to disk (or maybe just delays this). I then wrote a little script which runs hdparm -C /hda every second. The output from last night follows. Note that the drive was suspended for a good 5 hours (woo!). Another thing is that my hdparm -S settings seem to be completely ignored! It looks like, left to its own devices, the drive will enter standby mode after ten minutes. However, I tried doing a hdparm -S 1 (standby after five seconds) and other short intervals, in single user mode (where there are nearly no processes running which might write to disk), and the given interval passed every time with nothing happening. Finally, in my xconsole logs I see the following relevant items:
Sep 10 06:25:01 mi /USR/SBIN/CRON[19620]: (root) CMD (test -e /usr/sbin/anacron || run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily) Sep 10 06:47:01 mi /USR/SBIN/CRON[23582]: (root) CMD (test -e /usr/sbin/anacron || run-parts --report /etc/cron.weekly) Sep 10 07:30:01 mi /USR/SBIN/CRON[31328]: (root) CMD (test -x /usr/sbin/anacron && /usr/sbin/anacron -s) Sep 10 07:30:01 mi anacron[31330]: Anacron 2.3 started on 2000-09-10 Sep 10 07:30:01 mi anacron[31330]: Will run job `cron.daily' in 5 min. Sep 10 07:30:01 mi anacron[31330]: Jobs will be executed sequentially In other words, all the times that the drive started up during the night are accounted for. The last timestamp below, 9:09 AM, is the time that I got out of bed this morning and started writing this mail.. Having the drive enter standby mode (I think this means it stops spinning, although it still has power going to it) makes an audible difference. Now if only I could get the fan to stop... -chris Drive is now in standby mode Sun Sep 10 01:25:24 PDT 2000 Waiting for drive to exit standby mode... Drive is now NOT in standby mode Sun Sep 10 06:25:08 PDT 2000 Waiting for drive to enter standby mode... Drive is now in standby mode Sun Sep 10 06:35:23 PDT 2000 Waiting for drive to exit standby mode... Drive is now NOT in standby mode Sun Sep 10 06:47:13 PDT 2000 Waiting for drive to enter standby mode... Drive is now in standby mode Sun Sep 10 06:57:28 PDT 2000 Waiting for drive to exit standby mode... Drive is now NOT in standby mode Sun Sep 10 07:30:04 PDT 2000 Waiting for drive to enter standby mode... Drive is now in standby mode Sun Sep 10 07:55:34 PDT 2000 Waiting for drive to exit standby mode... Drive is now NOT in standby mode Sun Sep 10 09:09:05 PDT 2000 Waiting for drive to enter standby mode...
