Mark Weber wrote:
quoted text
> On 10/12/07, Mark Lord <lkml@rtr.ca> wrote:
>> That's interesting.
>>
>> So, either something is regularly accessing/polling the drive,
>> or it just doesn't work with the standby timer.
>>
>> Are there any interesting kernel messages being generated
>> during execution of those commands?
> 
> No messages to /var/log/messages as a result of those
> commands; I ran several times and did a sync too, just
> in case.
> 
> I very much doubt that something is regularly accessing
> the drives because I have a script that runs every 1/2 hour
> to check and log status. The drives stay "standby" for
> hours (even days) at a time unless I specifically access
> something on the RAID array. Then, they stay "active/idle"
> until I manually set them to "standby".
> 
> Anything else you'd like me to try?

Some things to check:

* Run "hdparm -I" on your drive. In the "Capabilities" section there is 
a line "Standby timer values", for some drives this mentions a device 
specific minimum. I know some drives that ignore any setting below 60 
seconds.

* I also know of quite a number of drives where hdparm -B settings 
override the -S settings, even if you set the -S settings after the 
hdparm -B settings. You could try combinations with various values of 
hdparm -B, especially 1 and 255.

Cheers,
Bart
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