HD-IDLE(1)

📦 version 1.05, in epel 10, epel 9, fedora 43, fedora 44

💖 HD-IDLE(1) 💖

okay bestie, so you know how this is a General Commands Manual page? yeah. and it's literally called hd-idle. let's get into it 💅

✨ NAME ✨

hd-idle — spin down idle hard disks 🌀💤

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

hd-idle [options]

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so hd-idle is this little utility program that spins down external disks after they've been sitting there doing nothing for a while. the reason it exists? most external IDE disk enclosures do not support setting the IDE idle timer. so like, if you want your idle disks to spin down automatically, you literally need a program like hd-idle to do it. no cap 🫶

⚠️ a word of caution, bestie, and I mean this with my whole chest: hard disks do not like spinning up too often. laptop disks are more robust about this than desktop disks, but if you set your disks to spin down after just a few seconds, you may damage the disk over time — the stress that spin-up puts on the spindle motor and the bearings is real 😭. it seems manufacturers recommend a minimum idle time of 3-5 minutes, and the default in hd-idle is 10 minutes. so like... don't be extra. 💀
⚠️ one more word of caution: hd-idle will spin down any disk accessible via the SCSI layer (USB, IEEE1394, ...) but it will NOT work with real SCSI disks, because they won't spin up automatically. thus it's not called scsi-idle 🙈 and it is not recommended to use it on a real SCSI system unless you have a kernel patch that automatically starts the SCSI disks after receiving a sense buffer indicating the disk has been stopped. without such a patch, real SCSI disks won't start again and you can as well pull the plug. literally. 🔌💀

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

  • -a name — set the device name of the disks for subsequent idle-time parameters (-i). this parameter is optional in the sense that there's a default entry for all disks which are not named otherwise by using this parameter. this can also be a symlink (e.g. /dev/disk/by-uuid/...) 🔗
  • -i idle_time — idle time in seconds for the currently named disk(s) (-a name) or for all disks. ⏱️
  • -l logfile — name of logfile (written only after a disk has spun up). please note that this option might cause the disk which holds the logfile to spin up just because another disk had some activity 👀. this option should not be used on systems with more than one disk except for tuning purposes. on single-disk systems, this option should not cause any additional spinups. 📝
  • -t disk — spin-down the specified disk immediately and exit. bye bestie 👋
  • -d — debug mode. this will prevent hd-idle from becoming a daemon and print debugging info to stdout/stderr. 🐛
  • -n — no-daemon mode. this will prevent hd-idle from becoming a daemon and print logging information to stdout. most useful if hd-idle is started by systemd. 🫶
  • -h — print usage information. the classic. 💅

🌈 DISK SELECTION 🌈

the parameter -a can be used to set a filter on the disk's device name (omit /dev/) for subsequent idle-time settings. the default is all disks. 👑

  1. a -i option before the first -a option will set the default idle time; hence, compatibility with previous releases of hd-idle is maintained. ✨
  2. in order to disable spin-down of disks per default, and then re-enable spin-down on selected disks, set the default idle time to 0. 🚫

🍓 EXAMPLE 🍓

hd-idle -i 0 -a sda -i 300 -a sdb -i 1200

this example sets the default idle time to 0 (meaning hd-idle will never try to spin down a disk), then sets explicit idle times for disks which have the string "sda" or "sdb" in their device name. iconic, honestly. 🔥

👑 AUTHOR 👑

hd-idle was written by Chistian Mueller <chris@mumac.de> 💜

this manual page was written by Christian Mueller <chris@mumac.de>, for the Debian project (and may be used by others). 🌸

and that's the whole page, bestie!! this lil cutie is from the General Commands Manual, source/version HD-IDLE(1), dated September 29, 2011 🎀 — go forth and let those disks nap, but like, responsibly. mwah 💋✨

📦 where this page comes from