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  • Putting the disk to sleep with hdparm -y /dev/sdb works! Commented Apr 7, 2022 at 17:46
  • "The drive is not spinning down after 3 min" – Please confirm you are aware that any disk activity resets the timer. How exactly do you know there was no activity? Commented Apr 7, 2022 at 17:52
  • Confirmed. The setup worked fine for months with a long 30min timer (I could audibly hear the drive spin down and up again, the raspi is right in front of me on my desk). Now even the shortest time values will not trigger a spindown. I did not change config or anything else on the rapsi. Commented Apr 7, 2022 at 18:05
  • Also, see my code example above. I set the timeout with -S 36. Then I query the set value using only -S. And it says "bad/missing". Thats wrong, isn't it?? It looks like hdparm didnt even set the value... Commented Apr 7, 2022 at 18:09
  • I really doubt hdparm -S can get the value. The manual says "set", while for some other options it explicitly says "get/set". And there is this answer which may or may not be right, but if hdparm -S ever worked for getting the value then I guess some answer there would advise it. I've seen other similar threads, some advise hdparm -I … | grep level (which I believe is totally wrong) but none advises hdparm -S. IMO the error you got tells nothing about your drive. Maybe you're right something is wrong, but the error has nothing to do with it. Commented Apr 7, 2022 at 18:49