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I'm interested in manually adjusting my hard drives' spin-down times with hdparm -S to make them quieter at night. The first thing I need to know is what their current spin-down times are, to use as a reference point and so I know what kind of changes I can expect.

Where can I look up this information?

Details

  • I am not asking how to look up the current Advanced Power Management setting (hdparm -B).
ændrük
  • 78,496

3 Answers3

3

According to the ATA/ATAPI-7 V1 (the specification that manufacturers should follow to be ATA compliant), there is no way to know the current spin down times, so hdparm wouldn't be able to. marc-andre solution only tries to determine whenever the drive can spin down and the spin up times:

udisks --show-info /dev/sdb | grep spin
    can spindown:              1
===============================================================================
 Attribute       Current|Worst|Threshold  Status   Value       Type     Updates
===============================================================================
 spin-up-time                205|203| 63   good    17.3 secs   Pre-fail Online 
 spin-retry-count            253|252|157   good    0           Pre-fail Online 
 spin-high-current           253|252|  0    n/a    0           Old-age  Online 
 spin-buzz                   253|252|  0    n/a    0           Old-age  Online

You can only know if a drive is currently active or not using hdparm -C

sudo hdparm -C /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
 drive state is:  active/idle
Braiam
  • 69,112
2

Disk Utility -> select HDD drive -> click on the "More actions..." icon on the top right corner -> Drive settings...

Mine is looks like this: screenshot

guntbert
  • 13,475
Ray
  • 906
0

you can use "disk utility" and after selecting your drive on the left pane, click the "view smart data" button on the right.

one of the attributes in the list that appears should be the drive spindown time. (using SSD drives at the moment,so the info is not available for me)

also you can get the info from commandline using "udisks" using "--ata-smart-refresh " . you can get more infos on how to set your spindown times at this manpage for "udisks" http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man1/udisks.1.html

marc-andre benoit
  • 597