Spindown

Spindown is a helpful tool that acts like a system daemon. Its main job is to spin down disks that are not being used, which helps save energy and can even extend the life of your disks. Pretty neat, right?

How Does Spindown Work?

So, how does it do this? Well, it keeps an eye on how many blocks are read from and written to the disks. When there's no activity—meaning no blocks are being read or written—the disk is considered idle. If a disk stays idle for a while, spindown will use sg_start to spin it down. The cool thing is that it works with USB disks and hot-swappable disks too! It doesn't care about device names like hda or sdb; instead, it uses the device ID.

Requirements for Installation

• sg_start

You'll first need to download the source code and compile it. Don't worry; there aren't any tricky dependencies (just sg3_start), so you should be good to go!

Getting Started with Installation

$ tar xvzf spindown-x.x.x.tar.gz

$ cd spindown-x.x.x.tar.gz

$ make

# make install

After you've compiled and installed the daemon, you'll need to configure it. Edit the sample configuration file (spindown.conf.example) using your favorite text editor. Once everything looks good, save your changes and copy that file over to /etc/spindown.conf.

The Configuration File Sections

Your configuration file has two main parts: a general section and several disk sections. You'll want just one general section but can have multiple disk sections.

[General]

[Disk 0]

[Disk 1]

...

[Disk n]

The General Section Explained

The general section only has two important settings: cycle-time and idle-time.

[General]

cycle-time = 60    # Seconds between checks

idle-time = 3600  # Time before spinning down the disk (in seconds)

A good cycle time is around 60 seconds, while an idle time of 3600 seconds (or an hour) works well too.

The Disk Sections Details

You can create several Disk sections as long as each one has a different ID or name.