On Monday 13 November 2017 07:19:45 Austin S. Hemmelgarn wrote: > On 2017-11-11 01:49, Jon LaBadie wrote: > > Just a thought. My amanda server has seven hard drives > > dedicated to saving amanda data. Only 2 are typically > > used (holding and one vtape drive) during an amdump run. > > Even then, the usage is only for about 3 hours. > > > > So there is a lot of electricity and disk drive wear for > > inactive drives. > > > > Can todays drives be unmounted and powered down then > > when needed, powered up and mounted again? > > > > I'm not talking about system hibernation, the system > > and its other drives still need to be active. > > > > Back when 300GB was a big drive I had 2 of them in > > external USB housings. They shut themselves down > > on inactivity. When later accessed, there would > > be about 5-10 seconds delay while the drive spun > > up and things proceeded normally. > > > > That would be a fine arrangement now if it could > > be mimiced. > > Aside from what Stefan mentioned (using hdparam to set the standby > timeout, check the man page for hdparam as the numbers are not exactly > sensible), you may consider looking into auto-mounting each of the > drives, as that can help eliminate things that would keep the drives > on-line (or make it more obvious that something is still using them).
I've investigated that, and I have amanda wrapped up in a script that could do that, but ran into a showstopper I've long since forgotten about. Al this was back in the time I was writing that wrapper, years ago now. One of the show stoppers AIR was the fact that only root can mount and unmount a drive, and my script runs as amanda. Cheers, Gene Heskett -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
