I have placed a hot spare in my system, precleared it thoroughly, I want  it to just sit there waiting for me to need it in event of failure (or even: in event of needing more space).

 

Issue is that I see the drive spins up after a reboot and does not spin down. I have also noticed that I see it spun up without a reboot, so something triggers it even when it is not part of the array.

 

Is there any way to force the disk to:

 

1) get spun down after a reboot

2) remain spun down during operation

 

If not I will solve it pragmatically and just pull the power from the drive..

you need to place a command in your go script so that after boot it issues the sleep command (which i believe is):

 

/usr/sbin/hdparm -S0 /dev/sdX

 

where X is the "hot spare" drive's assignment.

 

[edit] or could be the hdparm -Y /dev/sdX

someone better at these commands will likely correct me

another thought: if your using v5, I believe it now handles hot swapping, so you can simply leave the drive unplugged (likely better for it - although some say you should periodically turn it on, and perhaps every few months pre-clear it again to give it a "work out" and ensure its still functioning well).

another thought: if your using v5, I believe it now handles hot swapping, so you can simply leave the drive unplugged (likely better for it - although some say you should periodically turn it on, and perhaps every few months pre-clear it again to give it a "work out" and ensure its still functioning well).

Actually, it supports "limited hot swapping"  The array must be STOPPED first.  You cannot just unplug a drive, insert another, and have it just work.

I can run /usr/sbin/hdparm -S0 /dev/sdj without an issue, I get no error back but I do have the impression that the disk does not spin down. temperture still gets shown in unmenu if I hit refresh right after... If i use the spindown button in unmenu then temp changes to * Some time later however temp shows again which (I guess) means the disk is spinning ?