[ltp] Hard disk ignoring hdparm? (Not spinning down)

[Christoph Singer]

On 12.05.2004 11:04, Uwe Walter wrote:
> On Di, 2004-05-11 at 21:07, Christoph Singer wrote:
> 
>>I really don't know what to do - I can set "hdparm -B 1 -S 1", but the 
>>drive never goes to standby mode (and hdparm -C always reports 
>>"active/idle").
> 
> 
>>I'm quite sure that no process is accessing the disk, because if I do a 
>>hdparm -y the drives spins down and remains in standby mode for some 
>>minutes.
> 
> 
> I once had exactly the same problem with my Hitachi hard disk.
> 
> For me it turned out, that the culprit was the "SMART Auto Offline Data
> Collection", I had turned on with the smartctl application.
> With this setting active, the drive did never spin down on its own, but
> stayed in standby for several minutes (using laptop-mode) after "hdparm
> -y".

It's really mysterious: today my drive always spins down after a very 
short time, like it did the day before yesterday. And no, it's not after 
rebooting once, yesterday I rebooted very often hoping that the drive 
would spin down then, but nothing happened. Maybe it acts diffently on 
even and odd days ;-) I'm now really curious what my drive will do 
tomorrow...

Thank you for the tip with smartctl; I was not even aware of the 
existence of this program. I now have installed it because I was 
courious to see what settings it reports, and it says "Auto Offline Data 
Collection: Enabled". This is today, the drive is spinning down, so this 
setting does not seem to influence the standby behaviour.
When the strange behaviour of not spinning down will occur again, I'll 
try to play around with smartctl.

> However, you don't mention any change you might have made in this
> direction, so I don't think this is the solution for you.
In fact, I didn't play with smartctl before; but as I said I had been 
running Windows in the meantime; the only explanation I have is that 
some Windows program set some drive parameter to another value.

Christoph