Avoid HDD spinning up on Web Login + SSH Login by disabling to show HDD storage info on OMV Dashboard / Armbian Welcome Screen

porg · Jul 20th 2022

Let's login via SSH

$ ssh username@arbian-omv-machine.local

username@arbian-omv-machine.local's password:

___ _ _ _ _ _ ____ _

/ _ \ __| |_ __ ___ (_) __| | | | | |/ ___/ |

| | | |/ _` | '__/ _ \| |/ _` | | |_| | | | |

| |_| | (_| | | | (_) | | (_| | | _ | |___| |

\___/ \__,_|_| \___/|_|\__,_| |_| |_|\____|_|

Welcome to Armbian 22.05.3 Bullseye with Linux 5.4.199-odroidxu4

System load: 8% Up time: 22:44

Memory usage: 14% of 1.94G IP: 192.168.1.12

CPU temp: 43°C Usage of /: 5% of 58G

storage/: 51% of 2.7T storage temp: 36°C

👍 Is a nice status overview
👎 But it has one disadvantage: Querying the available "storage/" capacity spins up the HDD.
ℹ️ So each time you log in via SSH, the HDD needs to spin up, even if your SSH session is not HDD related at all (only working with rootFS on the SD card).

Login via SSH.
- Edit the config /etc/default/armbian-motd file (in my example with pico) with sudo because this config file is owned by root and valid for all users.
  - $ sudo pico /etc/default/armbian-motd
- Change the variable STORAGE from its default value to the value /dev/mmcblk0 (that's the device path of your SD card)
  - Note: Do not outcomment the variable, as this will cause a fallback to the HDD again (I tried).
- Write out the file with ctrl-O, confirm with ENTER
- Exit pico with ctrl-X
- On your next line the last line with storage/: and storage temp: will be gone.
The HDD will then not spin up anymore on each SSH login 🙂
- But ofc whenever any services or you in the shell access paths on the HDD ofc the HDD needs to spin up.

Caution: /etc/update-motd.d/ are the script parts which make up the welcome screen.

Read those to study how it works. But only edit /etc/default/armbian-motd where these scripts look for variables.

The same principle is true here too!