On 9/29/19 4:30 AM, Mark Fletcher wrote:
Any thoughts on where I might look to find settings that can be tweaked
to make it spin down when idle?
See sdparm and hdparm tools. hdparm is probably the wrong tool because
it's for internal drives connected to IDE/ATA/SATA busses. The reason
sdparm works for USB drives is because of SCSI-over-USB emulation. See
man page for more info.
The best way to do it is with a udev rule that will run some commands
when the USB device gets plugged in. Otherwise the device resets it's
config each time you plug it in.
Here's an actual example from my system:
-->cat /etc/udev/rules.d/86-Seagate-4TB-usb-disk-sleep.rules
ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="block", ENV{ID_SERIAL_SHORT}=="NA8E4BKU",
RUN+="/usr/local/sbin/udev-set-usb-hdd-spindown.sh"
-->cat /usr/local/sbin/udev-set-usb-hdd-spindown.sh
#!/bin/bash
PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin"
# Seagate USB3 4TB disk drive.
DISK_DEV=/dev/disk/by-id/usb-Seagate_Expansion_Desk_NA8E4BKU-0:0
if [[ -e "$DISK_DEV" ]] ; then
logger "Setting spindown on disk drive: $DISK_DEV"
sdparm --flexible -6 --set SCT=4000 $DISK_DEV
sdparm --flexible -6 --set STANDBY=1 $DISK_DEV
fi ; unset DISK_DEV
There's a convoluted reason why I call the script instead of just
running the commands in the udev rule itself. If possible I'd tell you
to just use a udev rule and skip the external script. Do what's right
for you.
There might be some GUI tool out there that will do this for you but
that's how I do it. See man pages and google for more hints. Good luck.
