Can you manually control disk spindown with a status indicator?

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Petermint
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Can you manually control disk spindown with a status indicator?

Post by Petermint »

NAS box with LM 18, SSD for system disk, and some magnetic disks used for a daily backup. The box is also used as a test Web server and for other experiments 24/7, including receiving copies of logs from other computers. The logs go to the SSD. The extra disk slots are loaded up with spare disks for backup.

I would like to leave the SSD up all the time and spin down the disks when not in use. Each disk has it's own share. The disk should spin up fast when a backup starts and shut down fast after use. I am reading http://www.larkinweb.co.uk/computing/sp ... linux.html and some other pages to set the spindown time. to a minute.

There are times when I need to browse files on the disks. A fast spindown will be painful. Opening up a terminal and typing in commands is unreliable. What would be nice is a disk icon, or similar, that I can click and mark a disk for continuous uptime.

I can then remote desktop into the NAS/test box and use a disk for a while without continuous waits for spinup. Is there something like that for Linux Mint?

The disk specifications say 50,000 spindowns are ok. I want a fast spindown to save energy but avoid 500 spindowns per day because the disks will die.

The backups are mostly rsync and that should work with a spindown of a minute. There maybe two or three backups to one disk. Three spindowns per day is 16,000 days of disk life. :D

How does spinup work in Linux? Would the first access of a share spin the disk up?

Any tips for a configuration like this?
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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