# Spin-Up on reading S.M.A.R.T data



## oliver@ (Sep 4, 2013)

Hi,

I switched from a 1 TB Samsung "green" to a 2 TB Toshiba/Hitachi Bacula storage harddisk. Usually the harddisk is unmounted during the day and configured to go to idle after a specific time. All my harddisks are monitored by using smartctl for their temperature every minute or so (MRTG->SNMP->smartctl).

The first thing I noticed with the new Hitachi disk is, that the harddrive does no longer spin down in IDLE mode. It only spins down in STANDBY mode.

So I switched my `camcontrol idle /dev/ada2 -t 60` to "standby".

The harddisk spins down when entering the STANDBY mode but immediately spins up again when S.M.A.R.T data is retrieved. This makes the whole thing senseless.

Does anyone know a possibility to spin down the drive and being able to access the S.M.A.R.T. data without having it spin up again? With the Samsung disk it was possible.


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## RobW (Sep 5, 2013)

From the smartctl manpage:


```
-n POWERMODE, --nocheck=POWERMODE
    [ATA only] Specifies if smartctl should exit before performing any checks when the device is in a low-power mode. It may be used to prevent a disk from being spun-up by smartctl. The power mode is ignored by default. A nonzero exit status is returned if the device is in one of the specified low-power modes (see RETURN VALUES below).

    Note: If this option is used it may also be necessary to specify the device type with the '-d' option. Otherwise the device may spin up due to commands issued during device type autodetection.

    The valid arguments to this option are:

    never - check the device always, but print the power mode if '-i' is specified.

    sleep - check the device unless it is in SLEEP mode.

    standby - check the device unless it is in SLEEP or STANDBY mode. In these modes most disks are not spinning, so if you want to prevent a disk from spinning up, this is probably what you want.

    idle - check the device unless it is in SLEEP, STANDBY or IDLE mode. In the IDLE state, most disks are still spinning, so this is probably not what you want.
```
It might be worth checking if the harddisk has a firmware update available.


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## oliver@ (Sep 5, 2013)

Yeah, I know the -n switch, but it will just prevent you from executing smartctl if the device is in the requested state to prevent spinning it up for example. But I want to use smartctl to retrieve data and not spin up the device 

Firmware updates... how often have you seen consumer disks where the manufacturer provides firmware updates? I can't remember any.


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## RobW (Sep 5, 2013)

I've had a couple of updates - though they were on SSD's. One stopped my other system from freezing which was driving me mad so now I do check occasionally.

As your other disk worked fine it points towards firmware, probably exactly why the -n switch was added. If the disk is in sleep or standby do you really need to worry about its temperature?


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## tingo (Sep 7, 2013)

Firmware upgrades on hard drives that I have run into last few years: Seagate Barracuda 7200.12, 7200.14, IBM Deskstar 60GXP (ok, this drive is old), SAMSUNG SpinPoint F4 EG (HD204UI). So I say yes, you do need to check for firmware upgrades whenever you buy a new model hard drive.


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