I have 2 hard drives in my Knoppmyth box. One drive (/dev/hda) has the /boot and /swap partitions. The second drive (/dev/hdb) is a Seagate 500GB IDE drive which has the /myth partition. It would be nice to let the /myth drive go into standby during the hours that Mythtv isn't recording shows. It will generate less heat, use less electricity and cause less wear on the drive.

As an initial test, I followed this wiki page
http://knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=Power+Management
and set my /myth drive to sleep after 10 minutes of being idle, by editing the /etc/hdparm.conf file:

I left the computer alone for 15 minutes. Then I used Putty to SSH into the machine and check the status of the hdb drive using:

It was in standby - it worked!

Then I decided I'd like to have the drive sleep after 60 minutes of being idle. So I went back through the procedure and put a value of 242 into the /etc/hdparm.conf file. I restarted the hdparm script and waited an hour for the /myth drive to go to sleep. It never did. I checked every 30 minutes or so. I took special care to only read the status of the drive with SSH.

What is going on? Why will the drive sleep if I set the time for 10 minutes but not when I set the idle time for 60 minutes?

=== added 12-18-06 ===

Perhaps the cron job that creates the "/myth/pretty" directory is waking up the /myth drive? I think it runs 2 times per hour. That must be it.

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KnoppMyth R5.5, Asus A8N-VM CSM (nvidia 6150 onboard video), AMD Athlon 64 dual-core 4200+, two 1GB sticks DDR 400, HD-3000 HDTV card, PVR-150 card, Iguanaworks RS-232 IR receiver/transmitter, Pioneer DVR-110 DVD burner