Hello,
I am using Knoppmyth R4V4, and because
of my new harddisk not beeing that silent, i wished for,
i want to shut down the harddisk on demand.
I tried this with hdparm -Y and with hdparm -y.

The problem is, that the harddisk will spin down, but automatically spins up again,
after some seconds.
/var/log/messages says something about dma timeout and ide init.
I tried to kill most of the running processes that may acces the harddisk,
but without any luck.

So is there any possibility to shutdown the hardisk and keep it shutdown ?

at least hdparm -Y seems to work on my mandrake system

This doesn't address the problem you had with making the disks shut down, but it does address the underlying problem of disk noise.

Read this article: http://www.silentpcreview.com/article8-page1.html

If you have a 5.25" bay available in your case, you can try sandwiching the drive and/or mounting it using elastic cord as the article's author did. If it works for you, it'd make the drive quieter 100% of the time, instead of just when you aren't accessing it.

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well that layout is fine and good, but if you have a harddrive like mine and the noise is from the spinning, not vibration, and it is a 7200RPM drive I seriously doubt that either of those will work. the first one will toast the drive in seconds from excess heat, and the second just wouldn't do anything. At some point I'm going to have to trade in my SUPER noisy WD 200G 7200 for a nice liquid bering 5400 or something so I can hear myself think in my livingroom again.

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Xsecrets

I haven't actually tried the techniques myself, but according to the article:



In theory, if you use the aluminum sandwich technique and don't use the suspension technique, you may reduce your noise and lower your drive's temperature, but YMMV.

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Hey, just a thought, have you tried activating the SMART acoustic management stuff?

didn't know there was accustic management stuff in SMART how would one go about activating that? is it in the bios?

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Xsecrets

I think the smartctl and hdparm man pages are the first places to look.

thanks I'll look into that. I had never even heard of smartctl and I didn't realize that SMART actually ever did anything worthwhile for anyone. Only time I've ever seen the SMART sytem report anything is after a drive has corrupted loads of data in bad sectors it finally tells you your drive may be going bad. Then it's like gee thanks for the heads up.

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Xsecrets

Also useful to get the drive temprature...

OOps i got some answers,
I'd never thought that anyone would answe ...
Ok thanks for now, I'll try to some up my answers.

Yes i already thought about the 5.25 Method,
but after reading lots of articles i really doubt that this will work,
because from what I've heard, this will just kill the "ground noise"
meaning low frequencies, but what i've got is that f**** sziiiiiiiingg ....
And this is a brand new Samsung Sp160 which was reported to be silent.
Besides i'd had to sacrifice my cd-rom, because this is the only 5.25 slot i got.

SMART is activated, but that does not help either, btw. if hdparm won't
work for you, you can get ubcd from sourceforge and use that one to enable smart,
great CD with lots of usefull tools.

But my problems still remains, hasn't anyone of you any experiences with shutting down the harddisk ?
I've found something already, but this would mean lots of work and kernel patching ..
there has to be an easier way ? ...