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I'm looking for a way to schedule when an external hard drive connected to my Linux (Debian 9) box goes to sleep (stops spinning).

To put this into content: I have a Linux box that runs as a multimedia server. If a call is made to fetch content that is on the external hard drive, it often takes 15-30 seconds for the hard drive to wake and start spinning which a) is frustrating and b) sometimes causes timeouts with the multimedia server. I could set the hard drive to be awake and spinning 24/7, but this seems a waste when most of the time I only use the multimedia server when I'm at home.

Is there any software tool or command I could use to set a weekly schedule for when the hard drive is spinning - e.g. Monday-Friday: SPINNING between 5pm and 11pm Saturday-Sunday: SPINNING between 3pm and 11pm OTHERWISE SPINNING on demand and sleep as per system timer

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    So you are decreasing disk run time, but starting/stopping your disk -40 times a week. Starting/stopping a disk is not without its costs. Unless electricity is very expensive where you are, it might not be worth the effort. Commented Jun 3, 2019 at 2:39
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    @waltinator Modern HDDs are designed to handle hundreds of thousands of start-stop cycles, so having one cycle per day is absolutely not harmful. It will literally take a thousand years to kill the HDD from excessive number of spin-downs at this rate. If anything, I would be more concerned about hours of useless spinning. Commented Jun 3, 2019 at 11:47
  • @waltinator Fair argument, but the whole point is that this would actually result in a net DECREASE in spin ups/downs, as at the moment it spins up and down more or less every time content is requested from the multimedia server, particularly during the times I want scheduling. As you say, it probably costs more energy every time the drive spins up - so leaving it spinning in the evenings would probably level off energy use. Commented Jun 3, 2019 at 15:24

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A cronjob would allow this:

# At 11pm every day, enable sleep after 30s 0 23 * * * /sbin/hdparm -S6 /dev/disk/by-id/... # At 5pm on weekdays, disable sleeping 0 17 * * 1-5 /sbin/hdparm -S0 /dev/disk/by-id/... # At 3pm on the weekend, disable sleeping 0 15 * * 0,6 /sbin/hdparm -S0 /dev/disk/by-id/...
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