Force spin-down of external hard-drive on linux (raspberry pi)

Posted by user258346 on Super User See other posts from Super User or by user258346
Published on 2013-09-29T11:29:17Z Indexed on 2013/10/21 21:56 UTC
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Filed under:

linux

|

hard-drive

|

external-hard-drive

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raspberry-pi

I'm currently setting up a home-server using a Raspberry Pi with an external hard-disk connected via usb. However, my hard-drive will never spin down when being idle.

I tried already the hints provided at raspberrypi.org ... without any success.

1.)

sudo hdparm -S5 /dev/sda

returns

/dev/sda:
 setting standby to 5 (25 seconds)
SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[]:  70 00 04 00 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 00 44 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

2.)

sudo hdparm -y /dev/sda

returns

/dev/sda:
 issuing standby command
SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[]:  70 00 04 00 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 00 44 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

...and 3.)

sudo sdparm --flexible --command=stop /dev/sda

returns

/dev/sda: HDD         1234

... without spin-down of the drive.

I use the following hardware:

Inateck FDU3C-2 dual Ports USB 3.0 HDD docking station
Western Digital WD10EZRX Green 1TB

Is it possible, that the sent spin-down-signals are somewhere overwritten/lost/ignored?

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