Prevent a USB external hard drive from sleeping

block-devicedrivershard-diskopenbsdscsi

Does anyone know if there is an elegant way to tell an external usb drive not to spin down after a period of inactivity? I've seen cron based solutions that write a file every minute, but nothing that smells of nice unixey elegance. There must be a hdparm, or scsi command that I can issue (usb drives are accessed via the sd driver in OpenBSD) to the drive to tell it to not sleep. I'm afraid that this is probably a feature built into the controller in the enclosure, and as such not much can change it aside from ripping the drive out of it's enclosure and plopping it directly in the machine, but I figured I would ask, on the off chance.

Ideally, I'm looking for an OpenBSD solution, but I know there are others out there w/the same problem so any solutions will be considered for the answer.

Best Answer

Yeah, it's generally built into the firmware. Some drive manufacturers provide an MS Windows based management tool that will allow you to modify various parameters, including disabling the "sleep" or spin down timer. If you have access to a Windows box it might be worth it to pursue that angle.

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In case this is helpful to anyone, another quick and dirty way of rescanning your SATA controllers is to issue the following command:

for i in `ls /sys/class/scsi_host/`; do echo "- - -" > /sys/class/scsi_host/$i/scan; done

This works for me even with internal, non hot-swappable SATA controllers where using the rescan-scsi-bus.sh command would not.

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USB drives have a chipset that converts USB mass-storage-device commands to IDE or SATA commands, which the drive then receives. Cheap chipsets (which are the majority, I imagine) don't pass on commands correctly to the drive that aren't directly related to reading or writing data from the drive. You are kind of at the mercy of that hardware with USB enclosures.

Sounds like only the most significant bit of the that -S value is being read by the drive or controller (off (>128) = power save mode, on (<127) = high performance mode)

You might get better feature support if your system has an eSATA port. eSATA talks directly to the drive so there is no "translation" or bridging of commands needed.

In my opinion, the best thing you can do to ensure a long life for a hard drive is:

clean power to the system, get a power-conditioning UPS
keep the device in a room with a steady ~70 degree temperature and low-humidity
minimize powering them on and off, but do power them down if not being used for an extended period of time
backups, backups, backups.

I'd say put your money into a UPS and another drive for backup. Do a RAID thing if you like.

Best Answer

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