Hi.

I'm upgrading my raid server from 2x500GB to 2x1TB drives. I've got a seagate barracude LP drive and a HD103SJ connected, and have installed ubuntu 9.04. It all works quite nicely, running from a via eden mini-itx motherboard, and only takes about 24 watts.

However, there is an issue that is really irritating me. The seagate drive keeps unloading the heads if it's not used for about 60 seconds, and then takes some time to come back, during which the machine is sluggish. It was spinning down completely, but after some research I found out how to get around that with hdparm. The Start_Stop_Count parameter reported by smartctl steadily increments, and I can't seem to find out how to stop this behaviour. Seagate's website is completely silent on the issue, and there doesn't seem to be anything I can find on google about it either.

Does anyone have any ideas? I don't know whether it will damage the drive eventually, but even if not it's damned annoying since the thing takes up to about 10 seconds to wake up when prodded.

On another note, has anyone tried Nomachine NX for a headless linux server? It's an alternative to VNC, and seems to be considerably faster and rather better integrated. I'm fairly impressed.

pca

Perhaps this:

hdparm -B255 /dev/sd?

Or try -B254 if that fails.

Nope, tried that. It stops it spinning down, but it still parks the heads of something similar after a period of inactivity.

pca

Well, that means they're using some vendor-proprietary secret command for it then. Assuming they even allow disabling it.

Cheers.