Determining hard drive state

[Alan Dayley]

By default, if the hard drive has power, it is spinning.  Unless the
host computer commands it to spin down, it is spinning.  In fact, some
research into this issue about two years ago showed that most drives
have a default idel spin down after 10+ hours.  So, unless you or the
OS or the driver or some entity in the computer tells the drive 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.  I don't know the specifics of version 7 but,
traditionally, MS Windows has a habit of pinging hard drives once a
second, just to make sure they didn't go away or something.  Linux
usually does not do this but configurations vary.

Alan

On Sat, Nov 14, 2009 at 11:32 AM, Kirk Bauer <kirk at kaybee.org> 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.
>
> 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
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