Spin down HDDs on Linux for extra quiet desktops at night

I often up/download large amounts of files while sleeping. I am still in the process of uploading my 600GB essential personal data offsite backup to AWS Glacier. With an average upload speed of 50-150KB, that takes a loooong time. So here are some tips to get the PC to shut up while asleep. This assumes your main disk is an SSD.

1. Make sure no application is accessing your hard drives

I have my HDDs in a ZFS cluster and one extra HDD that backs up the data of that ZFS, just in case. I don’t have much experience with ZFS and didn’t want to trust the system my personal data without a simple backup that I can wrap my head around. The cluster is mounted on ~/tank, hence I can watch all activity on the cluster with the following command

inotifywait -mr --format "%T: %e --- %f%w" ~/tank/

I leave this running for a day and find out that the only thing that is accessing my hard drives is Albert (a clone of the OSX Alfred) every 4 hours. Good enough, that’s a decent quiet time.

Put your hard drives to sleep

I have a simple script that stops the only processes that wake my HDDs up and puts them all to sleep. I call it ‘silence’.

function silence(){
	echo "spinning down hard drives of zfs pool"
	sudo hdparm -Y /dev/sda
	sudo hdparm -Y /dev/sdb
	sudo hdparm -Y /dev/sdc
	sudo hdparm -Y /dev/sdd
	sudo hdparm -Y /dev/sde
	sudo hdparm -Y /dev/sdg
	docker container stop plex
	pkill albert
}

to check on them and to make sure they’re actually all asleep (in case my ears don’t work) I have the issilence check

function issilence(){
	sudo hdparm -C /dev/sda
	sudo hdparm -C /dev/sdb
	sudo hdparm -C /dev/sdc
	sudo hdparm -C /dev/sdd
	sudo hdparm -C /dev/sde
      }

ok. Now they are quiet. But what about once they spin up again when albert does it’s thing?

Making them quiet on a regular basis, i.e. automatically spin down

Lastly, I need to tell the drives to shut up after a defined amount of time. For me that’s 10 minutes of inactivity. See here and here on askubuntu.com for a discussion what the difference is between -B and -S.

function alwayssilence(){
	#setting their Advanced Power Management Features, see man hdparm for details
	sudo hdparm -B 40 /dev/sda
	sudo hdparm -B 40 /dev/sdb
	sudo hdparm -B 40 /dev/sdc
	sudo hdparm -B 40 /dev/sdd
	sudo hdparm -B 40 /dev/sde
	#setting their sleep timeout to 120 and put to sleep right away
	sudo hdparm -S 120 /dev/sda
	sudo hdparm -S 120 /dev/sdb
	sudo hdparm -S 120 /dev/sdc
	sudo hdparm -S 120 /dev/sdd
	sudo hdparm -S 120 /dev/sde
}