Debian hdd spindown

If you're not using your Kurobox 24 hours a day, it could be good to allow the hard drive to spin down and reduce noise and power usage. For this you'll need to install hdparm to tune the sleep delay, and configure syslog to prevent it from writing to the disk, causing it to wake up every 20 minutes!

Install & Configure hdparm

• Installation

apt-get install hdparm

• Configuration

nano /etc/hdparm.conf

and uncomment the lines about /dev/hda at the end of the file, then add

spindown_time = 240

between the brackets. 240 means 240*5 seconds = 20 minutes idle before spinning down ;)

Modify syslogd Configuration

If you do not do that, your HDD will be turned on every 20 minutes because syslog will log a "MARK" in /var/log/messages every 20 minutes. So we need to remove that marking : edit /etc/init.d/sysklogd and set SYSLOGD to

SYSLOGD="-m 0"