Parking/Stopping Hard drives in a Linux box?

[sthayashi]

I have a linux router/storage server that I've mentioned on a couple other threads. Originally, I had plans to replace the a drive or two, and remove the loudest components in the system: 2 Seagate Barracuda Full Height SCSI drives. These drives can be heard throughout my apartment.

Unfortunately, money has become extremely tight due to a decision to get married and purchase a house, and even a simple purchase like a hard drive is a bad idea since I owe a lot of people a lot of money.

Anyways, I was wondering if there was anyway to stop the hard drives until I needed them. I access them about once a week or so. Since this machine acts as a router for the rest of my computers, it's on 24x7, so turning off the computer to pull/plug the hard drive everytime I needed it is a little unreasonable.

Is this possible?

Also, in the long term future, I plan to get a seperate router that will presumably be quieter and more efficient than a full computer. Is there anyway to have the computer turn on when accessed, then automatically turn off after, say an hour of inactivity? I've heard of Wake-On-Lan (WOL), but I've never used it before and don't know where to begin.

Thanks,

[douglas]

Check your mother board bios, it might be able to spin down hard drives which are in-active after a certain amount of time. Since it is scsi you might have to check the scsi card bios, if it is a card. That works on my machine for the data drive.

But the system drive has the swap partition, and this is always accessed, so that drive never spins down. You will have to turn off swap, and make sure you have enough system memory. Then you will also have to check for services which do disk access periodically, this will be different for each distro. Then that might work for you.

As for the make on lan, do a google search and see what you can find. You might be able to use a motherboard bios feature which will send a suspend mode after inactivity, but you might have to deffine inactivity, if it keyboard or mouse use, then your file server will have problems.

Or, you can lower the power use of the machine and make the machine quieter so this just doesn't matter. An ave. marriage costs $24,000 and a house $300,000, if you can do that, then why not a $120 samsung spinpoint? But that is not for me to say... sorry.

[grandpa_boris]

Anyways, I was wondering if there was anyway to stop the hard drives until I needed them.

i've been dealing with a similar problem and started a thread to solicit suggestions. you should experiment with noflushd and use hdparm to aggressively manage the spin-down of the drives. so far i have been unable to stop linux from not doing any flushing or logging at all, so i am experimenting with using tmpfs mounts for frequently updated logs that don't need to be persistent.

you may also want to look at the various linux projects that put linux on flash disks (ATA flash and so on) and network-boot linux. they aggressively rely on keeping everything the running system needs in RAM (using tmpfs and ramdisks) and avoid writing unless it's absolutely necessary or not write at all.

Also, in the long term future, I plan to get a seperate router that will presumably be quieter and more efficient than a full computer. Is there anyway to have the computer turn on when accessed, then automatically turn off after, say an hour of inactivity? I've heard of Wake-On-Lan (WOL), but I've never used it before and don't know where to begin.

wake-on-lan exists, but if your dedicated router is sufficiently low-powered, do you really need to turn it on and off? my silent (but for the occasionally running squealy 2.5" drive, see other thread) firewall/router/DHCP server runs silent. you can also build a router using a dedicated embedded motherboard that is designed to consume almost no heat and to boot off flash memory or over the net. usually these boards are based on processors that are too slow for the modern PC desktops, but more than fast and powerful enough to run a slim, dedicated OS like the stripped down router-targeted linux or BSD and handle 10Mbps TCP/IP traffic.

or you can just buy one of the many commercially available silent, fanless WAN firewall/routers that cost less than $100 and do everything you can possibly need....

[silvervarg]

I think the trick for this project is to go relly cheap.
My guess is that it will be a lot easier for you to use some money in a year or so to get a better solution, so lets focus on a temporary solution that is really low on cost.

First thing would be to look for HDD spin down features in BIOS and SCSI BIOS. This will likely be able to spin down the data disc 95%+ of the time, but you are still stuck with the OS disc.
Second thing I would do is look into options to put sound dampening materials near the harddrives on the chassi to reduce noise. This could reduce noise to half it's current level for <$5.

I would not spend the time and effort of doing anything more than this, since I would regard it as a temporary 1 year solution.

[sthayashi]

or you can just buy one of the many commercially available silent, fanless WAN firewall/routers that cost less than $100 and do everything you can possibly need....

I think you misunderstand my requests (though I failed to provide sufficient information as well). I fully plan on geting a WAN-type router. I was looking at Netgear's FR114P, specifically. I'm not too worried about the root drive. For really short term i.e. the next 5 months, quieting the SCSI drives is my only concern, since they're really loud. In the long term, when the router/file server turns into a dedicated file server, it would be prudent to have it power up/down automatically as I need it. But I have no idea where to begin on this.

My guess is that it will be a lot easier for you to use some money in a year or so to get a better solution, so lets focus on a temporary solution that is really low on cost.

You've summed up my thoughts on this in one sentence. Thanks.

As for the dampening material, what can you suggest thats cheap and effective for this? These are 5.25" full-height (2-bay) drives, so putting material around the drive itself may prove difficult, but putting things on the case may not be so bad.

Does hdparm work well (or at all) on SCSI drives? I've only heard of it's usage for people wanting to get better than ATA-33 speeds on their machines.

An ave. marriage costs $24,000 and a house $300,000, if you can do that, then why not a $120 samsung spinpoint? But that is not for me to say

That's alright. The short answer is that I think I can afford both marriage and house, but I'm not sure. It's my first house and my first marriage and too much money is flying around too fast. Example: In the last two weeks, I've spent $5290 on home inspections, a mortgage application, and as a show of good faith ("hand money" they call it here). I've never spent so much money in so little time. Even my car only cost $3k. Yeah, probably in the end, I'll still have a nice chunk of change sitting in my wallet, but until that happens, I'm going to act like I'm broke. Sorry to rant here, but it's been on my mind for some time.

[grandpa_boris]

I fully plan on geting a WAN-type router. I was looking at Netgear's FR114P, specifically.

this is probably a fine router for most applications. none of the inexpensive commercial solutions fit my needs, unfortunately, because i need to have dual-WAN routing with static route tables to make sure that specific address families are accessed only through the specific WANs. i've found a number of dual-WAN boxes, but they all seem to be targeting bandwidth scaling and fail-over only. that's why i am forced to build my own

I'm not too worried about the root drive. For really short term i.e. the next 5 months, quieting the SCSI drives is my only concern, since they're really loud. In the long term, when the router/file server turns into a dedicated file server, it would be prudent to have it power up/down automatically as I need it. But I have no idea where to begin on this.

in that case, assuming you will keep your system running linux, my earlier suggestions are still applicable: use hdparm to activate aggressive power saving and spin-down features of the drives, using noflushd package to reduce the number of log flushes and so on, and using tmpfs over-mounts to move busy directories off the disks, allowing disks to stay spun-down.

[Inexplicable]

You can spin scsi disks up/down with scsi-spin. It's part of the scsitools package found on many Linux distributions.