[TriLUG] Spinning down a SCSI drive

Owen Berry oberry at trilug.org
Fri Apr 7 14:52:30 EDT 2006


I have in my possession an old Sun Ultra Enterprise 2 server, which I
received for the bargain price of $0. It has 2 very noisy SCSI drives in
it, and while I'm figuring out what to do with this prize possession, I
was wondering if there is a way to spin down the SCSI disks when running
off a live CD.

I tried using hdparm -Sx, but from the output the action wasn't
supported by the drive. I should have written it down before shutting
off the machine (doh!) but it was something to the effect of
unrecognized parameter. And no, it wasn't hdparm that was complaining
about -S, it looked more like a response from the device.

I also looked for some of the scsi-xxxx tools on the livecd, but
couldn't find anything. Not sure if that's 'cos they weren't there, or
if those tools are obsolete.

I guess I could unplug the drives for now, but in the back of my mind
I'm wondering if I can set something up where I run off a live cd, and
have a ramdrive that synchs with the hard drive on startup and shutdown
for writeable data, with the drives being shutdown the rest of the time.
Maybe a little crazy. :-)

Any other suggestions?

Thanks,
Owen



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