New subject: [SLE] How spin down hdb when ACPI is unsupported?

21 May 2003

      SuSE users,

I have two hard drives of which the second one (hdb) is used as a backup 
unit, and as such it is used once a week or less. So, in order to save 
some heat and, above all, the noise I would like to spin down hdb a 
couple of minutes after booting. I used to do it by activating spindown 
in the BIOS on my old machine, but my new motherboard has ACPI instead.

When I installed SuSE 8.2 Pro the installation process got stuck when it 
came to examine the floppy during "Hardware..."-something, and the only 
way I could install was with the ACPI option disabled. I've tried to set 
the THROTTLED_DISK_TIME_OUT in YaST but it doesn't seem to work, neither 
the ACPI-deamon (it won't start no matter which modules I choose to load 
or not to load).

I guess the simplest way of accomplishing what I want is to do 'hdparm 
-S 90 /dev/hdb' but it would be nice not having to do it manually at 
every boot. Is it possible to specify a kind of cron job that takes care 
of it? Or can I edit some hard drive parameters somewhere and add 
'hdparm -S 90 /dev/hdb' to them?

I've looked everywhere in the KDE-menues and YaST for some kind of 
program or editor where I can edit some kind of hard drive parameters 
but I'm not sure what I'm looking for and I haven't found any matching 
programs.

Thank you for any ideas, directions or help.

/Lars

How spin down hdb when ACPI is unsupported?

Lars Norén

Mitch Thompson

Patrick Shanahan

Carlos E. R.

Mitch Thompson

Lars Norén

tags

participants (4)