102 lines
3.8 KiB
Groff
102 lines
3.8 KiB
Groff
.\" Hey, EMACS: -*- nroff -*-
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.TH HD-IDLE 1 "September 29, 2011"
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.\" Please adjust this date whenever revising the manpage.
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.SH NAME
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hd-idle \- spin down idle hard disks
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.SH SYNOPSIS
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.B hd-idle
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.RI [ options ]
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.P
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.SH DESCRIPTION
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hd-idle is a utility program for spinning down external disks after a period
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of idle time. Since most external IDE disk enclosures don't support setting
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the IDE idle timer, a program like hd-idle is required to spin down idle
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disks automatically.
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.P
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A word of caution: hard disks don't like spinning up too often. Laptop disks
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are more robust in this respect than desktop disks but if you set your disks
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to spin down after a few seconds you may damage the disk over time due to the
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stress the spin-up causes on the spindle motor and bearings. It seems that
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manufacturers recommend a minimum idle time of 3-5 minutes, the default in
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hd-idle is 10 minutes.
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.P
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One more word of caution: hd-idle will spin down any disk accessible via the
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SCSI layer (USB, IEEE1394, ...) but it will NOT work with real SCSI disks
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because they won't spin up automatically. Thus it's not called scsi-idle and
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I don't recommend using it on a real SCSI system unless you have a kernel
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patch that automatically starts the SCSI disks after receiving a sense buffer
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indicating the disk has been stopped. Without such a patch, real SCSI disks
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won't start again and you can as well pull the plug.
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.SH OPTIONS
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.TP
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.B \-a name
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Set device name of disks for subsequent idle-time parameters
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.B (-i).
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This parameter is optional in the sense that there's a default entry for
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all disks which are not named otherwise by using this parameter. This can
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also be a symlink (e.g. /dev/disk/by-uuid/...)
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.TP
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.B \-i idle_time
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Idle time in seconds for the currently named disk(s) (-a <name>) or for
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all disks.
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.TP
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.B \-l logfile
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Name of logfile (written only after a disk has spun up). Please note that
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this option might cause the disk which holds the logfile to spin up just
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because another disk had some activity. This option should not be used on
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systems with more than one disk except for tuning purposes. On single-disk
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systems, this option should not cause any additional spinups.
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.TP
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.B \-t disk
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Spin-down the specfified disk immediately and exit.
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.TP
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.B \-d
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Debug mode. This will prevent hd-idle from becoming a daemon and print
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debugging info to stdout/stderr
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.TP
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.B \-h
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Print usage information.
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.SH "DISK SELECTION"
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The parameter
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.B \-a
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can be used to set a filter on the disk's device name (omit /dev/) for
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subsequent idle-time settings. The default is all disks:
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.P
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.TP
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.B \1)
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A
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.B \-i
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option before the first
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.B \-a
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option will set the default idle time; hence, compatibility with previous
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releases of hd-idle is maintained.
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.TP
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.B \2)
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In order to disable spin-down of disks per default, and then re-enable
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spin-down on selected disks, set the default idle time to 0.
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.SH EXAMPLE
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hd-idle -i 0 -a sda -i 300 -a sdb -i 1200
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.P
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This example sets the default idle time to 0 (meaning hd-idle will never
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try to spin down a disk), then sets explicit idle times for disks which
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have the string "sda" or "sdb" in their device name.
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.SH AUTHOR
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hd-idle was written by Chistian Mueller <chris@mumac.de>
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.PP
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This manual page was written by Christian Mueller <chris@mumac.de>,
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for the Debian project (and may be used by others).
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