Keeping hard drive in sleep mode while not in use

I've got a spare hard drive in my box, which I'm currently using for backups with rsync scheduled to be done once a day via crond. Since it's only used once a day, I figured it would be a good idea to put it into sleep mode by adding `hdparm -Y /dev/sdb` to my backup script. However, I've got a problem with it randomly waking up while opening GTK save dialogs and such. How can I stop it from doing that or make it automatically go into sleep mode after a set amount of time while keeping my root drive awake at all times? And yeah, I know all the downsides of doing that, but noise is the primary issue here.

You can check laptop-mode-tools for the various tunables they use to optimize disk usage and let it spindown as much as possible.

Similar Messages

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    Is there any harm to the computer system to put it in sleep mode each time it is not in use as opposed to shutting the system down? I apologize if this is considered a silly question but curious to know if it causes any harm to the system apart from using up a small amount of hydro,
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    Thanks for the reply.
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    My experience with electronic tends to revolve around thermo stress, and removing all power vs going to sleep tends to be more or less the same.  Many components have power totally taken away, and others use so little power they cool off.
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    I appreciate the help A Brody, but this does not solve what I am asking. I like being able to focus on something like a YouTube video without having to worry about losing my "spot" if I want to move the cursor to pause the movie. I want to do this on demand and not have to worry about clicking a bunch of different stuff or opening a screenshot in Preview.
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    Hey guys,
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    Message was edited by: SFR6

    I did as you said, and I think I found the perpetrating program. It showed:
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    My iPod nano will go into the sleep mode while a song is playing a second after the screen goes blank; the song will stop and I will then have to press the sleep/awake button to pick up where the song left off.  How do I fix this?

    Your problem is that your iPod is not sensing that your headset is inserted. There is a pin inside the headphone port on the Nano that senses if it is inserted fully. If it does not sense anything, it will pause playback to save battery power when the screen dims. Here are the solutions:
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  • How to Back Up a Hard Drive from Recovery Mode when Disk Can't Boot

    I have a mid-2009 MBP that is experiencing problems booting. I was trying to repair my disk because I was experiencing problems with my finder and spotlight not returning any results upon my requests. I read some support discussions that indicated it might have been because my preferences/plist files had been corrupted. I deleted the files and they regenerated but then my computer froze and so I rebooted it.
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