Determining hard drive state

[Kirk Bauer]

I have a laptop with two hard drives: an SSD running Ubuntu 9.10 and a
regular hard drive with Windows 7.  My hope is that the spinning drive
is normally not spinning, but I can't hear it, and I can't figure out
how to tell (from Linux) if it is powered on or not.

I normally have the NTFS partition mounted but I want to make sure
that it doesn't cause the disk to remain spun up all the time.  I am
also considering shrinking the NTFS partition and putting an extra
ext3/ext4 partition on that drive for extra data on the Linux side,
and I'm not sure if that is going to cause the disk to remain spun up
all the time either.

Thanks in advance!

------------------------------------------------------
Kirk Bauer <kirk at kaybee.org>
http://linux.kaybee.org | www.logwatch.org
Author, Automating UNIX & Linux Administration