Comment 3 for bug 568120

No harddisk spindown anymore in 10.04

I have build my own nas box around an atom board, and in it I have 4 1.5 Tbyte disks. When I build it I had low power in mind, so the operating system sits on a 2.5 disk that runs 24/7, and the disks that hold the array spin down when not needed.

Two days ago I updated this 9.10 server to 10.04, and discovered I could not spin down the array disks anymore. As stated before, it seemed hdparm.conf was ignored. If however I did hdparm -S 240 /dev/sd[a-d] it issued standby commands to all disks, but instantly the disks seemed to spin up again. In fact, it looked like even this command seemed to do nothing at all.

I then scrapped the whole thing and did a fresh install of 10.04 amd64, and again the disks would not spin down. Somewhere in the process my os disk failed as well, so in the end I put a new 2.5" disk in and installed 9.10 server again. Disks are nicely spun down again and all is like it should.

Tinkering with laptop-mode-tools did not help either, it resulted in a failed array. I had enough downtime here and will keep the box running 9.10 for a while.

Since this box does dhcp / dns and some other stuff that is needed on a daily basis, I cannot test anything as more people depend on functionality on the box. I have no idea whether this is caused by hdparm or something else.