On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 2:44 PM, Mark Knecht <markkne...@gmail.com> wrote: > Paul, > Would hdparm be advisable if the drive was part of a RAID? I suspect not. > > I don't think this applies to the OP but for the sake of discussion > why not include RAID as part of the solution, if possible.
I use hdparm to set power-saving on all members of my RAID5 and it works (in my case, I'm setting them to never spin-down). I created a file /etc/local.d/hd-power-level-fix.start containing one line: hdparm -B 254 /dev/sd[abcdef] which automatically sets those drives to never spin down. In my original recommendation, I hadn't considered hdparm's "spindown immediately" option. I was thinking of the -B command like I used above, to adjust the "spin down after X idle time" option. If all members of the RAID have the same idle time they'll probably all spin up and down together under normal usage (well, depending what kind of RAID it is, I suppose). In my case, I found the "click, whirr, click, whirr, click, whirr, click, whirr, click, whirr" waiting for 5 disks to spin-up when I accessed the RAID annoying, so I disabled it. (I have not done any power-consumption measurements to see what that's costing me...)
