Hard disk spindown setting not working

ezacaria · 2015-02-15 23:04:24

I have a Seagate ST4000VX000 drive, and I seem to be unable to prevent it from parking the heads.

The drive goes to either sleep or standby after very short time, even if I use hdparm -S 0. I get the message "setting standby to 0 (off)" but this does not help. Granted, the drive is functional again within some seconds. However, I have concerns that the disk may deteriorate unnecessarily. Moreover, the lag can be annoying. For example, if I am working on a text file and the drive went to sleep while grabbing a coffee, I need to wait for it to wake up until I can start typing again.

I tried hdparm -S0 and also a high value of the sleep timer (e.g., hdparm -S 242), without results.
The drive complains when I try to use the APM method, so hdparm -B 255 fails with "HDIO_DRIVE_CMD failed: Input/output error" and hdparm -B says "APM_level = not supported"

The documentation from Seagate says that "The drive provides programmable power management to provide greater energy efficiency. In most systems, users can control power management through the system setup program". And the data sheet mentions idle3: "Idle3 spin control features enable power-on in standby mode or drive spin‐down to conserve power and improve reliability during archival periods."

I have not tried to set the sleep time in the windows power settings, because I believe that this will not be a permanent setting. On the other hand, I could not find any utility from Seagate that would allow to permanently change the timers.

Currently I am running out of ideas. I tried "idle3ctl --force -g" to see if I could get idle3 tools to play with the drive (given that idle3 was mentioned in the data sheet), but I get "sg16(VSC_ENABLE) failed: Input/output error"

By the way, the SSD in the system also fails in hdparm -B, and I am wondering if this could be related to BIOS settings. I seem to remember disabling APM some time ago because I was having some random crashes.

rep_movsd · 2015-02-27 00:19:25

See this link : https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ad … Green_HDDs

And this one : http://www.storagereview.com/how_to_sto … th_wdidle3

Last edited by rep_movsd (2015-02-27 00:22:30)

ezacaria · 2015-02-27 05:54:11

Thanks for the reply!

I tried hdparm -J, but it failed with "wdidle3_vsc_enable_disable: Input/output error".
Perhaps the reference to "idle3 spin control" is misleading and this feature from Seagate cannot be controlled by the WD utilities. As mentioned, I had also tried the idle3 tools (idle3ctl) without success. Recently, I also verified that acoustic management is not supported, i.e., hdparm -M will not help.

I made some more testing, and the drive seems to spin down every two minutes. The Load_Cycle_Count increases when querying it after the 2 minutes.

Interestingly, checking the S.M.A.R.T. information seems to reset some timer in the drive. I tested issuing the command "smartctl -a" on the disk every 30 seconds, and the drive does not spin down, so smartctl keeps it "awake". It also "wakes up" the drive if it was already "sleeping/snoozing".

Thus, I believe that the simplest option is to make a basic "keep awake" program to work around the buggy interface. I will make a small python program that monitors /proc/diskstats and uses smartctl periodically for a configurable period - after which it will leave the drive alone and let it spin down. This is somewhat similar to what the hd-idle tool does, except that here I will keep the drive awake rather than put it to sleep. Alternatively, I may just run smartctl via "watch" when I know that I will be working with the disks for a long period.

Since the smartctl -a appears to be a "read only" operation and this is by definition a monitoring tool, I suppose that there is no harm in using it repeatedly. Any other idea as to what may be better to use as "keep awake" is, of course, welcome

Last edited by ezacaria (2015-02-27 06:57:13)

kokoko3k · 2015-02-27 07:09:38

As a last resort, try
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/hd-idle-cvs/

-edit
ops, sorry, just read *all* of your last post

Last edited by kokoko3k (2015-02-27 07:11:09)

Arch Linux

#1 2015-02-15 23:04:24

Hard disk spindown setting not working

#2 2015-02-27 00:19:25

Re: Hard disk spindown setting not working

#3 2015-02-27 05:54:11

Re: Hard disk spindown setting not working

#4 2015-02-27 07:09:38

Re: Hard disk spindown setting not working

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