hdparm, HD spindown, how to get status?

[ThomasX]

Hello,

I want to do HD spindown with hdparm, but want to make sure, that the HD is not going off and on 100 times a day. Therefore I want to log, what is going on. However, I haven't found a possibility to *ask*, if the current status of the HD is spun down or not (of course without spinning it on again).

Any help would be great.
Thomas

[Dave_Bechtel]

--Unless you're on a laptop, I wouldn't recommend this. I tried it with a regular IDE drive a few months ago, and got kernel panics(!!) Plus, when trying to spin the drive up again and mount a filesystem, it would just hang. Reboot fixed it, but not an encouraging experience.

--Just let it spin, and keep a spare drive handy in case you need it.


Hello,

I want to do HD spindown with hdparm, but want to make sure, that the HD is not going off and on 100 times a day. Therefore I want to log, what is going on. However, I haven't found a possibility to *ask*, if the current status of the HD is spun down or not (of course without spinning it on again).

Any help would be great.
Thomas

[ThomasX]

Hi Dave,

I actually made good experience with spindown so far. It really all looks a bit random, if you will make good or bad experience. For example, I made very bad experience with USB-HD. Whenever the HD became full, my linux crashed somehow. The HD (or usb electronic) was not responding any more, so the driver hand, so the OS hang :-( later someone told me, that many usb-ide electronic may not be "well tested".
And when the HW fails, the data gets corrupted, no reiserfs or what ever can help then.

But now I have the next big problem, but write about it in a new thread, so others may find it and hop on.


Thomas