I tried smartctl.  It reported that the apm data was unavailable.  I 
couldn't get it to stay on, so I came up with a workaround.  I set up a 
cron job with two commands.  The first touches a file on that drive.  
The second deletes it.  I set this for 10 minutes and it s eems to be 
working.

On 11/28/21 1:23 PM, AZ Pete via PLUG-discuss wrote:
> Hi,
> I have had the same problem with USB connected drives on my Pis, but I 
> needed the reverse. Namely, I wanted them to spin down after some 
> time. The bottom line is that since the hard drive is connected via 
> USB, the USB hardware itself may prevent the drive from spinning down 
> (or always shut it down). But, I've had some success using the 
> smartmon tools package to control how/when a given hard drive will 
> spin down. The package is called smartmon tools, but the command 
> itself is smartctl. A few examples:
> sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda            - display all info about drive
>     sudo smartctl -g all /dev/sda        - get all non-SMART settings 
> (i.e. Advanced Power Mgmt setting)
>     sudo smartctl --set=apm,127            - set Advanced Power Mgmt
>     sudo smartctl --set=standby,241        - set standby timer to 
> 30min (not sure if this superseded by apm setting)
>
> A low value means aggressive power management and a high value means 
> better performance. Possible settings range from values 1 through 127 
> (which permit spin-down), and values 128 through 254 (which do not 
> permit spin-down). The highest degree of power management is attained 
> with a setting of 1, and the highest I/O performance with a setting of 
> 254. A value of 255  disables Advanced Power Management altogether on 
> the drive (not all drives support disabling it, but most do).
>
> You'll have to dig into the man pages and play around with the various 
> APM settings to see if you can get things to work as you like.
>
> If all else fails you could just set up a cron job which runs a script 
> every minute that simply touches a file on the drive (i.e. touch 
> /some_folder/some_dummy_file.txt), which should prevent it from 
> spinning down.
>
> Hope this helps.
> Peter
>
>
>
> On 11/27/2021 9:00 PM, Jim via PLUG-discuss wrote:
>> I have a hard drive attached via a USB adapter to my raspberry pi. 
>> The problem is that the disk always shuts down after a few minutes of 
>> inactivity.  When I want to access something on the disk or write to 
>> it, I have to wait for it to spin up.  How would I go about setting 
>> it so it doesn't spin down?  I tried to look online and found sdparm 
>> mentioned, but found nothing I could understand. Please help. Thanks
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