[ltp] spin-down, hdparm -S, T40p, hitachi hard disk

[Uwe Walter]

Hi Fabrice, hi Will!


On Do, 2004-02-19 at 14:18, Uwe Walter wrote:
> It just does not go to sleep automatically, regardless what I set with
> hdparm.

I found the reason (Will brought me to it, thank you)!

I have enabled the SMART feature "Auto Off-line Data Collection", which
instructs the disk to run less or more extended self-tests every few
hours.

I liked this feature, since I was hoping the drive would be able to
notify me about arising problems more accurately than without
self-testing itself regularly and only monitor its operational
activities.


However, exactly this kept the disk from spinning down.


I am also unsure about the "value" of this feature, since there are no
regular self-tests appearing in the SMART log of the drive. Everytime, I
do one manually, there is an entry written in the drive's log...
Probably, it does them silently, probably not at all.



For everyone interested, I can only recommend the package
"smartmontools", which allows many interesting SMART queries/tests via
its "smartctl" tool.
E.g. I have a small boot script, which queries the SMART status during
system boot and notifies me, if it's not "healthy", as I found no
thinkpad BIOS option to do this for me.
And if the SMART status is never queried, it can't even try to give any
pre-failure notification (if it can at all is another discussion ;-)).

(Fabrice, of course, no news to you, since you are already running
smartd, which is undoubtly even better than my just-during-boot-time
solution. Probably I will activate it, too.)


Thanks to everyone!


Greetings, UW(e)