power management, hard drive power down

Como · Dec 21, 2005

building a new server, need silence.

i usually use slackware, other distro's considerable.

biggest things needed:

ABILITY TO HAVE DRIVES POWER DOWN WHEN IDLE! cant stress it enough, i plan on having over 10 drives eventually runnin on this thing, ATA, SATA, USB, etc, etc. i need to have them power down when idle so that they dont make so much darn noise.

ease of use command line- im used to slackware, so id like to stick there.

stability in samba, because its gonna be a network storage central.

vnc and kde effeciency. it wont have its own monitor, but i still need to run some gui-based programs via WINE on it.

dvd burner freindly. ive never burned a dvd in linux, and im planning on burning many on here.

open to suggestions, but the drive power down feature is the most important thing i need. anyone here set it up?

klingens · Dec 21, 2005

Poewring down is not really a olution. Better one is buying seagate drives.
As for the program to do it: man hdparm
-M get/set acoustic management (0-254, 128: quiet, 254: fast) (EXPERIMENTAL)
-B set Advanced Power Management setting (1-255)
-y put IDE drive in standby mode
-Y put IDE drive to sleep

Como · Dec 21, 2005

buying a specific drive type isnt a solution at all, i allready have several differet brands and ill only buy when i get a good deal.

hdparm looks like a possible solution, but doesnt look all too sata friendly.

Gnufsh · Dec 21, 2005

Drives should spin down autmatically, I'm not sure what contrrolls that. You can use hdparm to set some acoustic management parameters, and laptop-mode to reduce writing to the drives and waking them up.

electrorcamd · Dec 21, 2005

Gnufsh said:
Drives should spin down autmatically, I'm not sure what contrrolls that. You can use hdparm to set some acoustic management parameters, and laptop-mode to reduce writing to the drives and waking them up.

The BIOS should have a setting on the power management screen to control when the drives spin down.

Como · Dec 21, 2005

ah, but using a pci sata card there is no bios control of the drives, as far as i know.

MRD · Dec 22, 2005

On boot, you can usually hit a key to enter bios configuration for the card. At least you can on my scsi card and my ata133 card.

Como · Dec 22, 2005

hm. think the cheapest most generic pci card one would have that?
if i had two identical cards, would that cause problems?

MRD · Dec 22, 2005

Not sure. My card were very cheap/generic though.

kaltag · Dec 22, 2005

hdparm can spin down drives you.

Code:

hdparm -S $timetosleep /dev/whatever

will spin the drive down automatically after the time you set has passed with no activity. When the disc is accessed again it will spin back up with no problem. My server uses this for it's 6 drives.

Code:

hdparm -S 120 /dev/whatever

note: 120 does not correspond to seconds or minutes, it's some other number I've never understood. After you run the command it will say how long in seconds or minutes until spindown. The man page has more info.

note 2: As of the time of this posting it doesn't support SCSI/SCSI emulation discs. i.e. external drives and SATA drives. you may have to see if there's a BIOS option to enable it at a hardware level. This will work fine for PATA though.

Como · Dec 22, 2005

thanks kaltag. unfortunately the drives are gonna be mostly sata, but that will be nice for the system drive.

btw, kaltag, look down in the fah charts

-netman86

kaltag · Dec 22, 2005

Como said:
...btw, kaltag, look down in the fah charts

-netman86

...I hate you...

Edit: Found this which can maybe help a bit http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Use_hdparm_to_improve_IDE_device_performance

Como · Dec 22, 2005

you think you hate me now, help out in my gen.hardware and gen.cooling posts.

making these rigs silent will add:

DUAL dlt3c server w/ 2 gigs ram folding 2x bigpackets
2500+ xp-m on an nf7-s w/ 512 ram folding bigpackets
2500+ xp-m on an nf7-m
dlt3c on generic board

oh, and if i can get some ddr2 on the cheap ill have a pentium D 820 folding.

that looks like a nifty little program. not very sata related, but has some sidenotes on other programs that may do it. thanks

Gnufsh · Dec 23, 2005

Have you looked at blktool?
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gkernel/

Como · Dec 23, 2005

im having a hard time finding a description on that link...what does it do?

Gnufsh · Dec 23, 2005

I believe it's similar to hdparm, but should work on sata drives (the link has other programs as well).

Como · Dec 23, 2005

/me hugs gnufsh

ill give it a shot when i get the server up and running

power management, hard drive power down

Como

Member

klingens

Member

Como

Member

Gnufsh

Senior Member

electrorcamd

Member

Como

Member

MRD

Senior Member

Como

Member

MRD

Senior Member

kaltag

Senior Member

Como

Member

kaltag

Senior Member

Como

Member

Gnufsh

Senior Member

Como

Member

Gnufsh

Senior Member

Como

Member

Similar threads