Re: Cheap NAS

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> > It's also worth noting: on my setup with a spinning rust laptop drive
>> > hooked via USB 3 to my RPi, the drive doesn't spin continuously
>> > (apparently). So on occasional use, I wait a couple of seconds for the
>> > drive to spin up before it can transfer at full speed. It's possible an
>> > SSD would solve this, but I had the laptop drive around already.
[...]
> Or try the hdparm command to change spindown time or other power saving
> parameters.  I use this to deliberately spin down my NAS drive after 10
[...]
>    if NAS1=`findmnt -n -o SOURCE /nas1/main`; then /sbin/hdparm -S120 $NAS1; fi

Side note:

- In my experience, whether `hdparm -S..` works on a USB drive depends
  on the USB<->SATA adapter in use.  If it doesn't, `hdparm` will tell
  you, tho.
- On my WD drives, the `-S` seems to be completely ignored and instead
  the spin down time is chosen by the drive based on the APM setting
  (i.e. `hdparm -B...`).  I heard there's a `idle3-tools` thingy that
  may be able to provide finer control, but I never tried it.


        Stefan