hdparm (9.39-1+b1) spin-up/spin-down bug

I installed a hard drive in my NAS today and luckily I had the case open and was able to hear the hard drive spin-up and then spin-down every couple of seconds. This frequency of activity was troubling because it could easily wear out the hard drive in a few months. The bug essentially causes the system to ignore the spin-down time you have entered. I have the spin-down time set to 20 minutes and it was spinning down every couple of seconds even when I was playing a movie from the drive.

Some searching on the internet led me to discover that this is a known bug:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=684241

The hdparm version installed is 9.39-1+b1 and the bug is fixed in 9.42-1. Currently I work around this by setting the advanced power management to 128 which disables spin-downs.

Would it break anything if I were to update hdparm to the later version? Could anyone suggest the best way to do this?

Thanks for pointing out hd-idle. Couple of questions on how you use it:

1) Did you disable or otherwise remove hdparm? If not, how do you keep the two from interfering with each other?
2) How did you setup hd-idle on your system? I've seen examples of people using it as a service and examples of them running it as part of their boot process.
3) Did you consider just updating hdparm to the latest version so that you can control the parameters from the OMV GUI?

Thanks!

I think hd-idle may be the way to go even if I can install the updated hdparm. Looking at the change it doesn't look like they've fixed the problem, only set the drive to 128 which is exactly what I did. More a work-around than a fix.

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/hdparm/9.42-1ubuntu1

Set spindown policy back to -B128 instead of -B127. Too many drives
    misbehave too badly with this setting, possibly leading to drive failure.
    We should revisit this once we understand why people's drives are spinning
    back *up* so frequently (closes: #684241)

For anyone interested in my installation notes/cheat-sheet:

hd-idle:


   Tools to Build the Package (debhelper already installed):
      apt-get install build-essential

   Get hd-idle source (downloads to the current directory):
      wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/hd-idle/files/hd-idle-1.05.tgz


   Uncompress and enter directory
      tar -xvf hd-idle-1.05.tgz
      cd hd-idle

   Build and Install
      dpkg-buildpackage
      dpkg -i ../hd-idle_*.deb

   Configure (nano /etc/default/hd-idle)
      START_HD_IDLE=true
      HD_IDLE_OPTS="-i 0 -a sdc -i 1800 -l /var/log/hd-idle.log"

   Stop/Start/Restart Service:
      /etc/init.d/hd-idle stop
      /etc/init.d/hd-idle start
      service hd-idle restart

Thanks for all your help!

I ran into a question. hd-idle isn't logging anything in the '/var/log/hd-idle.log' file. I even created an empty file to see if it not existing was the issue, but it didn't do anything.

I checked to see if the service is running with 'service --status-all' and got:
[ ? ] hd-idle

But I started it manually '/etc/init.d/hd-idle start' and didn't see anything in the log file either. Running at the command line 'hd-idle -i 0 -a sdc -i 1800 -l /var/log/hd-idle.log' didn't show anything in log.

I see it running 'ps ax | grep hd-idle', so I know it is running, but it never outputs to the log file.

So a log entry showed up finally. Just one so far and randomly out of the blue. The machine has been on all day and the entry is:

date: 2015-12-25, time: 17:44:37, disk: sdc, running: 5040, stopped: 540

So I guess it just isn't a very active log.