Arch Linux

toni

Member

Registered: 2011-10-15

Posts: 437

HOWTO: Use hdparm on an external USB hard drive

I have an external USB hard drive 3.5" that is placed into a enclosure. I want to set  the standby (spindown) timeout for the drive to disabled. I know that it can be done using following command:

hdparm -S 0 /dev/sdb

but previous to do it I would like to know which is the current setting for standby (spindown) timeout. How to do this?

Also, when retrieving detailed information from device by using:

hdparm -I /dev/sdb

I am getting below error:

/dev/sdb:
 HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(identify) failed: Bad address
 HDIO_GET_IDENTITY failed: Invalid argument