Re: [smartmontools-support]suggestion; avoid spinning up disks

[Bruce A. <ba...@gr...>]

Hi Peter,

> I have been playing with Smartmontools 5.26.  :-)
> 
> My second (noisy) hard drive is normally spun down, but Smartmontools
> spun it up at regular 30 minute intervals - until I modified
> /etc/smartd.conf to only look at the main drive.
> 
> Could a configuration option be added to /etc/smartd.conf to postpone
> interrogating spun down disks, or only look at those parameters that
> do not require that the disk be spun up, until something else causes
> the disk in question to be spun up?  Possibly calling "hdparm -C
> /dev/hdx", or similar from inside Smartmontools could be useful.

Interesting idea...

So you'd like smartd to first ask the disk, 'are you currently spinning'?  
And if the answer is 'no', then just skip it and move on to the next disk.

I don't know enough about sleep, standby, and idle modes to know if this
is possible.  It may be that *any* command to a spun-down disk causes it
to spin-up, even if that command doesn't require that the platters be
moving.

But the hdparm -C command suggests otherwise.  I'll take a look at the
hdparm code to see how it works, and get back to you about this.  If I
provide some guidance, would you be willing to modify/test smartd.c?

Bruce