Linux 2.4.x SCSI Disk Spin Down

The spindown program stops spinning a SCSI disk if it's idle for a while. This program has been written for Linux 2.4.x.

The spindown program periodically looks at I/O disk activity statistics available in /proc/stat. A disk idle condition is detected if the disk statistics aren't changed for a while. Once a disk idle time out is reached, the program sends a SCSI motor control command in order to spin down the disk motor.

The spindown program has been tested on a Linksys NSLU2 network storage platform with a FREECOM 400GB external USB disk connected to port 1. NSLU2 has been running the V2.3R63-uNSLUng-6.8-beta firmware.

Download the spindown program:

A simple way to test whether the spindown program works well for your external USB disk connected to the NSLU2 device is to go through the following steps:

enable telnet on NSLU2 using the WEB interface,
copy the spindown program to the external USB disk,
open a telnet session and log into NSLU2 as root,
copy the spindown file from the USB disk to the root file system,
execute the spindown program from the root file system.

On a Linux host:

# mount -t cifs 192.168.1.77:/HDD_1_1_1 /HDD_1_1_1

# cp spindown /HDD_1_1_1

# telnet 192.168.1.77

# login: root

# Password: uNSLUng

# cp /share/hdd/data/HDD_1_1_1/spindown /opt

# /opt/spindown -d 300 /dev/sdb

# exit

Your external USB disk connected to port 1 should stop spinning in 5 minutes.

Note that if you have a flash memory stick connected to NSLU2, it shouldn't be managed by the spindown program. Otherwise, a motor control command failure on such a flash stick device may cause a motor control failure on other USB disks. The "-" option can be used, for example, to avoid the flash stick being managed by the spindown program.