Enabling Hard Drive Power Down?

[CentaurHualer]

I'm new to Kubuntu, and experimenting on a couple of machines. I have not been able to figure out how to tell the system to spin down the hard drive after a period of time. The system I'm working with now is an industrial mobo (WinSystems EBC-C3) with a VIA C3. I've tried setting it up in the BIOS, but Kubuntu does not seem to want to load the ACPI power management under "System Services", and the hard drive does not spin down.

[CentaurHauler]

Re: Enabling Hard Drive Power Down?

Anybody? I'm trying to put together a low power system, and spinning down the hard drive is a part of that.

[dibl]

Re: Enabling Hard Drive Power Down?

I'm far from expert on this topic, but I do know that the capabilities of the drive itself are important. Have you done the hdparm or sdparm verbose output to confirm that your drive is controllable that way?

Here's what Google found for me on the subject:

http://www.ma.utexas.edu/users/stirl...wersaving.html

http://www.linux.com/howtos/Battery-...powersav.shtml

[CentaurHauler]

Re: Enabling Hard Drive Power Down?

Thanks - added

/dev/hda {
spindown_time = 60
}

to the hdparm.conf file.

[MepisReign]

Re: Enabling Hard Drive Power Down?

I'm not familiar to that kind of settings. My question is: The hdd would have a longer life that way?

MepisReign

[CentaurHauler]

Re: Enabling Hard Drive Power Down?

I don't know about longer life, though it would seem likely it would. I'm looking for low power consumption and low noise. I'll still have to do a bit of tweaking though, as various applications are still running the hard drive even when nothing is happening - I've had Windows machines that did this too, though mostly with older versions.