After a long battle with technology, Alan Dayley wrote: > On Sat, Nov 14, 2009 at 11:32 AM, Kirk Bauer wrote: >> 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. "hdparm -C /dev/whatever" should tell you. Disks that are spinning show up as active/idle, disks that are not should be standby or sleeping. Disks that are USB give me a set of weird SCSI errors and "unknown", though, so YMMV on this. > By default, if the hard drive has power, it is spinning. Unless the > host computer commands it to spin down, it is spinning. Oh, and most any > command sent to the drive by the host will cause it to spin back up. Linux > usually does not do this but configurations vary. In general, you won't be able to spin down any disk that contains / , /var , /usr , or /home unless nobody's logged in. -- I will rule you all with my iron fist. YOU! Obey the fist! --Invader Zim My blog: http://crow202.org/wordpress/ Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss