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As hdparm does not work for my USB external drive (it spins down too early), I’d like to simulate stand-by control manually by a simple script with the following idea:

  • monitor I/O to the disk
  • when, except for the script itself, there is no I/O from other processes for some time, produce dummy I/O to keep disk alive
    • after some time let drive spin down
    • the dummy I/O should at best be nothing that actually reads or writes to disk (and therefore moves the mechanics producing wear-out) but maybe read some status etc.

I’m not experienced enough in Bash scripting to know which commands could be used. Any suggestions? The system is Arch Linux.

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    Does smartctl work? That is, does smartctl -d sat --all show disk info? If it does, there is -g option to modify apm settings. Commented Jun 6, 2015 at 15:28

2 Answers 2

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(I am aware this question is over 2 years old, however the problem is still actual)

I am using the following code for my drive that doesn't respect smartctl settings:

#!/bin/bash while : do date +%s > /second_drive/keepalive_linux.txt sync sleep 2 done

To make it run at startup, I used:

EDITOR=nano crontab -e

And added:

@reboot bash /path/to/script.sh

(the drive is NTFS formatted, by the way)

It is the same behaviour that KeepAliveHD for Windows has.

While it could be done in a better way (like the OP described), it's better than nothing for now.

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Google should get the credit for this one:

http://www.unix.com/programming/161666-tool-simulate-non-sequential-disk-i-o-simulate-db-file-sequential-read-c-posix.html

#!/bin/bash for ((N=0; N<10; N++)) do dd if=gigabytefile of=/dev/null skip=$((RANDOM % 1024)) bs=$((1024*1024)) count=1 done
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  • Sorry, but this seems completely unrelated. Commented Apr 4, 2015 at 12:52

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