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Right Now I'm using hdparm command in unix to shut down the hard disk but there are few issues with it.

  1. when it wakes back up it consumes lots power. Is there any other way to do it?
  2. Many times when I put my hard disk to sleep, I can see few bursts at the beginning and then after a while it goes to sleep. I think its because of the journaling system in ubuntu (which I use) Have anybody encountered that?
  3. What would be the best linux/unix operating system (eg: ubuntu/centos/redhat) to work on extensive hard disk operations?

I would highly appreciate if you could share the problems you encountered while doing this operation.

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migrated from stackoverflow.com Oct 6 '10 at 0:54

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/bin/sh|any other application: input/output error, if disk doesn't comes back at first request –  kagali-san Oct 6 '10 at 0:44
You will probably get a better answer for this on superuser.com –  bta Oct 6 '10 at 0:47
1. It starts to consume, or it consumes more than usual - but for few first seconds? –  kagali-san Oct 6 '10 at 0:51
@mhambra: For the first few seconds its not stable i.e. it goes to sleep and wakes back up two or three times and then goes to sleep for a long time. Why is this? –  Sunil Oct 6 '10 at 1:07

3 Answers 3

Is it USB drive? USB peripherals are usually draining lot of power even when in power saving mode.

  1. If you run multi-core/multi-processor machine, you should exclude any 64-bit distro, due to default kernel scheduler getting hangy with exhaustive I/O rates. Read here: AMD64 system slow/unresponsive during disk access (Part 2), or you can switch to a kernel version, that has better scheduler: ubuntu forum thread
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Can you list your requirements - i.e. it would be helpful to know for what purpose you need to shut the disk down frequently in a non-usual manner, why using the native OS driver tools aren't cutting it, etc.

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I'm working on gigabyte data's and would like to see the energy consumption. So when a only a cpu is active and I/O is idle for say 30sec, I wanna see if shutting down CPU helps in power consumption. –  Sunil Oct 6 '10 at 3:50

Sorry - it's still not clear to me what you are trying to do, unless I can assume you mean "the hard drive" rather than "CPU" in the above?

If you're optimising power consumption to that level of granularity, then I suggest you talk to the manufacturer of your hard drive directly. General answers for e.g. SATA / USB / IDE connected drives aren't going to satisfy your requirements, if I read the question correctly.

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