# Suspend Hdisks

## crevette

How Can I do to suspend my disk after Xminutes of inactivity???

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## crevette

is acpi manage this?????

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## mglauche

look at the manpage of "hdparam": "man hdparam"

There should be some options for it there ..

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## helmers

Ha! I was just going to create this thread myself!  :Laughing: 

To suspend the first HD on the first controller

```
hdparm -y /dev/hda
```

You can change that "-y" to a "-Y", but with my Dell Latitude L400 that

means it will never wake up, and I have to reboot.

However I am having HUGE problems getting this to work. In fact,

all it does, is suspend the disk(to tease me I presume), and spins

it up again. This drove me mad, so I:

Turned of swap

Killed all programs (even X)

Stopped system loggers

sync'ed

...but still no go!? I am puzzeled. APM works, but only with --suspend, --standby does NOTHING.

Also, ACPI prevents the systems from using the CPU fan, and my system crashes. And the i8k modules don't work. Help?  :winkl:

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## chadh

I haven't played with this, but I have seen hints other places.  The problem is that all the various daemons/system processes that are running are writing to your syslogs, which of course require the disk to be spun up.  Try googling around, and I bet you can find a list of suggestions to decrease log activity (or at least buffer it).

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## helmers

Umh, I am 100% certain I have NO junk running. Just booting, logging in as root, killing ALL deamons.

The only thing I haven't done is unmount all filesystems.  :Rolling Eyes: 

However, if I don't log in, it auto-suspends after the selected amount of minutes (5) in my local.start script. That makes zero sense to me.

On a side note, it suspends just fine with Windows XP, and I haven't done anything to make it stop writing to disk there (I.E. event logger). It looks like the filesystem deamons (ext3) or bash is being evil.

Is this a kernel issue? Could someone with a laptop tell me if their disks suspend? Because I really could use the extra silence + added battery life...  :Wink: 

--

Regards,

Helmers

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## helmers

Ha! I've got it!

I use slackware on the laptop  :Embarassed: , because I don't like compiling all that much, but anyways, all you need is the "noatime" flag in your /etc/fstab!

I believe gentoo uses it by "default"; at least the entries in the fstab file was that way when I looked at it, but it slackware it's set to "default".

Regardless, my hd now STFU whenever I want it to  :Wink: 

--

Regards,

Helmers

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## crevette

And how can I do to suspend HD after 10 Minutes (Or 1 Hours).

did I have to do a script?

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