Determining hard drive state

[Alan Dayley]

Nice explanation, Kirk.  Thanks.

Alan

On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 6:47 AM, Kirk Bauer <kirk at kaybee.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 9:45 PM, Alan Dayley <alandd at consultpros.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 4:22 PM, Kirk Bauer <kirk at kaybee.org> wrote:
>>> For the record, I have both ntfs and ext4 partitions on the drive,
>>> both mounted at all times under Ubuntu 9.10, and the drive remains in
>>> a "standby" state except when I'm actually using the drives.
>>
>> Interesting.  If I may ask, I'd like more details for my own education.
>>
>> How do you know the drive is in standby?
>
> I know when it is in standby by running "hdparm -C /dev/sda" (as I
> learned on this list).
>
>> How do you know when you are actually using the drive?
>
> For me, the only thing I have on the drive is my Windows partition
> (which I virtually never use) and my data stores for VMWare Server.
> So even though the drives are mounted, and even though VMWare Server
> is running, until I actually access the Windows filesystem or
> create/start a virtual machine, the drive isn't being used.
>
>> As you start using it, is there any latency or pause before the access
>> starts?  If so, how long does it last?  (Not looking for hard numbers,
>> just a felt guess.)
>
> Definitely a 2-second delay when I first access the drive when it is in standby.
>
>> After you use it, how long before they go back to standby?
>
> 30 seconds (because of the -S setting below)
>
>> Did you do any special settings or configuration to achieve this behavior?
>
> Default Ubuntu 9.10 settings, except I added this to /etc/hdparm.conf
> (not sure what the default would have been though).
>
> command_line {
>       hdparm -B 1 -S 6 /dev/sda
> }
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