HDD spindown

[Z-Man]

Hopefully I'm not flamed for this question but I've searched the forums and read the stickies.

How can I force my HDs to spindown when unmounted?

Live CD 4.0.2.

The buggers get hot.

[OErjan]

use the comand hdparm and the flag -Sn (capital S, not s) where n is a set value as in the qoute below from man hdparm.

-S Set the standby (spindown) timeout for the drive.
This value is used by the drive to determine how long to wait (with no disk activity) before turning off the spindle motor to save power.
Under such circumstances, the drive may take as long as 30 seconds to respond to a subsequent disk access, though most drives are much quicker.
The encoding of the timeout value is somewhat peculiar.
A value of zero (0) means "timeouts are disabled": the device will not automatically enter standby mode.
Values from 1 to 240 specify multiples of 5 seconds, yielding timeouts from 5 seconds to 20 minutes.
Values from 241 to 251 specify from 1 to 11 units of 30 minutes, yielding timeouts from 30 minutes to 5.5 hours.
A value of 252 signifies a timeout of 21 minutes.
A value of 253 sets a vendor-defined timeout period between 8 and 12 hours, and the value 254 is reserved.
255 is interpreted as 21 minutes plus 15 seconds. Note that some older drives may have very different interpretations of these values.

hdparm -S1 /dev/whatever

will set the disks timeout at 5 seconds

[Z-Man]

Thank you very much kind sir.
Worked like a charm.
Mebe now I won't have to reboot every 3 days...