External drive: disable spin down?

General Discussion
1

Hello,

I installed DietPi on a Raspberry Pi 4 and attached an external 2.5 drive to it. I moved the data to this drive to reduce access to the sd card.

I installed samba, NZBGet, Radarr, Sonarr and NZBHydra2 on the Raspberry and I would like to keep the system running 24/7.

Atm the spin down is set to 2 minutes, but I am wondering if I should extend the timeout or disable the spin down completely to take care of the drive.

What do you think would be the best solution to keep the drive healthy as long as possible?

Thank you…

2

What’s wrong with having the drive spin down? They are designed to do so to save power.

3

Parking heads can increase the load cycle count dramatically. Most drives are designed for a maximum of 300k, I had a failed drive with nearly 2 million in half a year of usage. Just google for „load cycle count“ :slight_smile:

4

I too found that if the HD spun down (was using a 1TB MAC HD) I had to disable it with hdparm

Some howto’s I found with a quick search
https://askubuntu.com/questions/39760/how-can-i-control-hdd-spin-down-time
https://www.hecticgeek.com/2012/09/how-to-disable-or-change-the-hdd-spin-down-time-in-ubuntu-12-04/
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/5211/prevent-a-usb-external-hard-drive-from-sleeping

I did a super brute force script that crontab would “touch” a file in the HD in question every minute…more or less a poke, poke, poke stay away method…

*/5 * * * * /bin/touch /dev/sdb &>/dev/null

5 minutes would be fine as well

This way no internal settings are tweaked but a timed action keeps it alive

5

ProXy
Use dietpi-drive_manager and select spin down time 0: Disabled or any other time from the list.