Some useful commands:
This check current IDE power mode status of the disk:
– unknown (drive does not support this command),
– active/idle (normal operation),
– standby (low power mode, drive has spun down),
– sleeping (lowest power mode, drive is completely shut down)
The operators: -S, -y, -Y, -Z can be used to manipulate the IDE power modes
hdparm -C /dev/sda
Force an IDE drive to immediately enter the low power consumption STANDBY mode, usually causing it to spin down:
hdparm -y /dev/sda
Force an IDE drive to immediately enter the lowest power consumption sleep mode, causing it to shut down completely. A hard or soft reset is required before the drive can be accessed again:
hdparm -Y /dev/sda
Put the drive into idle (low-power) mode, and also set the standby (spindown) timeout for the drive. This timeout value is used by the drive to determine how long to wait (with no disk activity) before turning off the spindle motor to save power:
hdparm -S /dev/sda
Disable the automatic power-saving function of certain Seagate drives (ST3xxx models?), to prevent them from idling/spinning down at inconvenient times.
An example:
hdparm -y /dev/sdd
/dev/sdd
issuing standby command
hdparm -C /dev/sdd
/dev/sdd
drive state is: standby
And this is the READ test of the disk:
hdparm -Tt /dev/sdc /dev/sdc: Timing cached reads: 21590 MB in 1.99 seconds = 10828.31 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 310 MB in 3.00 seconds = 103.20 MB/sec