Tweaking Hard Disk settings

Drive inactivity sleep

If you are using an rpi with hard disks as an application or other server.
Then one feature you may want to enable is the sleeping of the drives after 20mins or so.
(similar to the default setting on synology boxes).

• https://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Features/Tune-Your-Hard-Disk-with-hdparm

We can do this with hdparm To set the drive inactivity sleep time to 20mins / -B to 100 (default is 128)

hdparm -B 100 -S 240 /dev/sdb

• The B level (which represents how much power the drive should use) needs to be less than 128 for the drive to be able to sleep.
• For S the value is multiplied by 5 for values between 1 - 240 for the number of seconds.
  so 240 x 5 - 1200 = 20mins

To query the current B power value (the default is 128 which disables spindown)

hdparm -B /dev/sdb

To query if drive is active / or spun down

hdparm -C /dev/sdb

To query the read time speed

hdparm -t /dev/sdb