Get Idle Hard Drives to Sleep

At this point, I would like to digress to a topic that was really annoying and took me a bit to resolve. It’s how to spin down hard drives when they are idle. As mentioned earlier, I bought a 5TB USB-3.0 drive from Western Digital as an external hard drive for additional storage. When connecting it to the PC, it never stopped spinning. Apart from the wear on the drive, this also produces a constant background noise that I wanted to avoid.

Some research showed that under Ubuntu, some hard drives do not automatically go to sleep when idle. However, there is a way to achieve this. And it works perfectly for me. First, you’ll need to check if the drive’s controller supports hdparm. To do so, call

sudo hdparm -C /dev/sdc

If the drive state is reported as e.g. active/idle, it is supported, otherwise not. In my case it reported drive state is: unknown.

No matter, if hdparam is supported or not, you will need to determine the UID of the drive by calling

sudo blkid

Find the UUID for the corresponding drive. E.g.

/dev/sdc1: LABEL="Elements" BLOCK_SIZE="512" UUID="FCD216FAD216B8BA" TYPE="ntfs" PARTLABEL="Elements" PARTUUID="7902be53-dd2a-4613-b580-c89f0525e4fc"

If hdparam is supported by your drive, edit /etc/hdparm.conf and add the following lines at the end (time is defined in 5-second steps, so here it is 60 * 5 seconds, i.e. 5 minutes) to set the delay after which the drive shall go to sleep:

/dev/disk/by-uuid/FCD216FAD216B8BA {
        spindown_time = 60
}

There are some hard drives out there that do report a correct state when calling hdparam, but do not support the spindown time setting. If that is the case with your drive, or if hdparam does not work and the drive state is reported as unknown, try hd-idle. You need to install it by calling

sudo apt install hd-idle

If this does not work, install it manually by first calling

wget https://www.foxplex.com/components/uploads/gDzcGMoX-hd-idle_1.05_amd64.deb

to get the package from here (see section “Einstellung per hd-idle / für harte Fälle”) and then running

sudo dpkg -i gDzcGMoX-hd-idle_1.05_amd64.deb

Adjust the configuration:

sudo nano /etc/default/hd-idle

Modify or add the following lines (time for -i in seconds, here 5 minutes):

START_HD_IDLE=true

HD_IDLE_OPTS="-i 0 -a /dev/disk/by-uuid/FCD216FAD216B8BA -i 300 -l /var/log/hd-idle.log"

Start the service and enable it, so that it gets automatically started at boot time from now on:

sudo systemctl start hd-idle
sudo systemctl enable hd-idle

Now the hard drive will spin down after the configured time.

To manually spin it down immediately, call

sudo hdparm -y /dev/sdc

if hdparam works or otherwise

sudo hd-idle -t sdc

Note:
This page contains affiliate links to Amazon. Feel free to order your hardware anywhere, but it would be nice of you to use these links so that I get a small reward for writing all this information up. 😉

◄ Ubuntu     Own Domain ►