Spin-Up on reading S.M.A.R.T data

O

oliver@

Developer
Hi,

I switched from a 1 TB Samsung "green" to a 2 TB Toshiba/Hitachi Bacula storage harddisk. Usually the harddisk is unmounted during the day and configured to go to idle after a specific time. All my harddisks are monitored by using smartctl for their temperature every minute or so (MRTG->SNMP->smartctl).

The first thing I noticed with the new Hitachi disk is, that the harddrive does no longer spin down in IDLE mode. It only spins down in STANDBY mode.

So I switched my camcontrol idle /dev/ada2 -t 60 to "standby".

The harddisk spins down when entering the STANDBY mode but immediately spins up again when S.M.A.R.T data is retrieved. This makes the whole thing senseless.

Does anyone know a possibility to spin down the drive and being able to access the S.M.A.R.T. data without having it spin up again? With the Samsung disk it was possible.
 
From the smartctl manpage:

Code: 
-n POWERMODE, --nocheck=POWERMODE
    [ATA only] Specifies if smartctl should exit before performing any checks when the device is in a low-power mode. It may be used to prevent a disk from being spun-up by smartctl. The power mode is ignored by default. A nonzero exit status is returned if the device is in one of the specified low-power modes (see RETURN VALUES below).

    Note: If this option is used it may also be necessary to specify the device type with the '-d' option. Otherwise the device may spin up due to commands issued during device type autodetection.

    The valid arguments to this option are:

    never - check the device always, but print the power mode if '-i' is specified.

    sleep - check the device unless it is in SLEEP mode.

    standby - check the device unless it is in SLEEP or STANDBY mode. In these modes most disks are not spinning, so if you want to prevent a disk from spinning up, this is probably what you want.

    idle - check the device unless it is in SLEEP, STANDBY or IDLE mode. In the IDLE state, most disks are still spinning, so this is probably not what you want.
It might be worth checking if the harddisk has a firmware update available.
 
Yeah, I know the -n switch, but it will just prevent you from executing smartctl if the device is in the requested state to prevent spinning it up for example. But I want to use smartctl to retrieve data and not spin up the device ;)

Firmware updates... how often have you seen consumer disks where the manufacturer provides firmware updates? I can't remember any.
 
I've had a couple of updates - though they were on SSD's. One stopped my other system from freezing which was driving me mad so now I do check occasionally.

As your other disk worked fine it points towards firmware, probably exactly why the -n switch was added. If the disk is in sleep or standby do you really need to worry about its temperature?
 
Firmware upgrades on hard drives that I have run into last few years: Seagate Barracuda 7200.12, 7200.14, IBM Deskstar 60GXP (ok, this drive is old), SAMSUNG SpinPoint F4 EG (HD204UI). So I say yes, you do need to check for firmware upgrades whenever you buy a new model hard drive.
 
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