[System] howto change the drive sleep state?

[Fred-VIE]

Hello! I've just installed Kubuntu and mentioned, compared to the other distris I have tested that my drives are always asleep even though I just used them a short time ago.

Under energy savings I can just find the monitor. How can I increase the time until the drives goto sleep?

thanks!

[rab0171610]

First of all, how are you determining that the drives are in a sleep state? I have used Kubuntu, Arch, Gentoo, Fedora, Debian to name a few with Sata and Solid state drives and never had any indications my drives were in a sleep state. So I am just curious how and or where you are seeing this information.
Second of all, what kind of drives are you referring to and what interface? How are they connected?

[rab0171610]

That being said, I use a gnome app called gnome-disks. I believe there is a native version for KDE. In gnome-disks, you can select the drive, then click on the three dots on the top bar, and select drive properties. I do not know if these can be changed as mine are all mounted, so the options are grayed out. I would assume you could install the app in the Live CD:
sudo apt install gnome-disks
and see if you can change any of the properties, since the disks would then not be mounted. That is just a guess. I know there is a version of this app for KDE, but I do not use it so I cannot tell you what it is called. Someone else may have better information on that or how to tune the disk performance in another app or the command line. Good luck!

[Fred-VIE]

First of all, how are you determining that the drives are in a sleep state?

Because it takes like 5 to 10 seconds to start programs that opened instantly on other Distris.

Also I had Dolphin open, did something else, copied a path in from the browser and there was that delay again.

When it is the HDD then I can actually hear it waking up.

I have 4 SSD's, 1 nvme and 1 HDD all on S-ATA.

[rab0171610]

Fair enough. One thing I always do is turn on indexing in KDE. I use mlocate to find files in the command line so i don't need it. You might try turning that off in system settings and see if that helps. It locks up my system esp on startup and first installation. It is under "file search." You can always re-enable it if you need it.

[Fred-VIE]

File indexing is off in File Search. It's contraproductive with ssd's anyways afair

[rab0171610]

The only way I know of to tune disks is hdparm. I haven't had to use it in years (since IDE). Read up on how to use it and take warnings before you start using it. It should be available in the repos if you don't already have it installed.

[Fred-VIE]

hdparm doesnt seem to have a gui, at least nothing happend when I searched for it and chose the "run hdparm" option that came up

[rab0171610]

no it is a command line tool, but very powerful, use:
man hdparm
or search google for online how to guides, but be careful

[Fred-VIE]

I was just checking it out in the console, thx.

Tbh it is kinda odd, sleep state aint some major thing to need a command line tool for it nor should it be dangerous to like tell it to stay awake for at least 20 mins but well, thats Linux for you I guess.

[rab0171610]

I agree but I didn't write the program. If you have any luck, let us know. It can help others who have the same issue. Check back regularly, as someone else may post something more helpful than I have.

[rab0171610]

I will say, that having Kubuntu installed on a green 5400 rpm drive was slow. I now have it on an SSD with no issues. As for 7200rpm I also never had performance issues.

[Fred-VIE]

I broke too many distris already lately because of my trying stuff that did nothing with Win since win3.11 but seems to destroy Linux everytime.

Since there is no setting in Kubuntu for it I will let it alone for the time being until I get more important things to run who have been wasting my time.

Thank you though, I will keep that tool in mind.

My Kubuntu is on a slower SSD but since Mint is running fluently on an even older and slower SSD (100 GB) it shouldnt be a problem. The HDD is just my data dump.

[rab0171610]

Ok good luck!

[jlittle]

Do you have hd-idle installed?

I use it to put my spinning drives to "standby", which normally means to spin down. (I had to work to achieve this; hd-idle wasn't in the ubuntu repos when I started using it. My desktop is on a hard floor that acts as a sounding board amplifying the vibration from the drives, one of which is a WD black that vibrates strongly.) The settings for hd-idle are in the file /etc/default/hd-idle, where I have (after stripping comments)

START_HD_IDLE=true
HD_IDLE_OPTS="-i 180 -l /var/log/hd-idle.log"

The 180 means spin down hard drives after 180 seconds of inactivity. However, often that's too long to wait and I spin down the drives using, for example,

sudo hdparm -y /dev/sdc

Now hd-idle is only necessary because my drives don't do "Advanced Power Management". I can see that by running

sudo hdparm -B /dev/sdc

/dev/sdc:
APM_level = not supported

If you don't have hd-idle, maybe the "Advanced Power Management" is spinning down the drives. You might run the hdparm -B command to find out.

The hdparm -S command is meant to be able to set a spindown timeout, according to the hdparm man page:

The encoding of the timeout value is somewhat peculiar. A value of zero means "timeouts are disabled": the device will not automatically enter standby mode. Values from 1 to 240 specify multiples of 5 seconds, yielding timeouts from 5 seconds to 20 minutes. Values from 241 to 251 specify from 1 to 11 units of 30 minutes, yielding timeouts from 30 minutes to 5.5 hours. A value of 252 signifies a timeout of 21 minutes. A value of 253 sets a vendor-defined timeout period between 8 and 12 hours, and the value 254 is reserved. 255 is interpreted as 21 minutes plus 15 seconds. Note that some older drives may have very different interpretations of these values.

So, maybe your spin down timeout can be set using hdparm -S. I'm not sure if this is related to the APM_level but using it does not work for my WD and Seagate drives.

For your non-spinning drives I wouldn't expect any delay in accessing them.