[ale] Spinning down a scsi disk?

[Chris Ricker]

On Thu, 30 Jan 2003, Robert L. Harris wrote:

> 
> 
>   We have some systems which sit idle waiting to be used as semi-hot
> spares.  Those happy little machines are just running their disks.
> We've recently had some of them hit their disk MTBF and die at the next
> reboot.
> 
>   We're wondering if it's possible to "spin down" the scsi disks not in use.
> Yeah, this won't help / and /usr much but for /usr/local/data it'll help
> as that's alot less painful as loosing the data.  As the boxes sit idle
> for a year or so, spinning them down will save some lifetime.
> 
>   Would setting "disconnect" in the bios spin down disks not in use or
> is there something that can be set in the adaptect driver?
> 

Doing it in an automated fashion (like IDE disks do, tunable via hdparm)
required a kernel patch and a daemon running last time I looked at it.
Look for something called scsi-idle. I don't know if its available for
2.4 -- it was probably 2.2 days when I messed with it.

There are also command-line utils that you can run just to send the SCSI
stop or start commands. Those won't require a kernel patch, but you will
have to run them manually. Look for applications cleverly named
scsi-start and scsi-stop, or scsi-up and scsi-down, or something like that.

(the kernel patch is just to export to userspace the length of time the
disk has been idle, and then the scsi-idle daemon monitors this and runs
scsi-stop once the idle hits the configured value)

There might be a more elegant solution these days, but that's the best
I've tried....

later,
chris
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