# Spinning Down Hard Disks



## atwinix (Jan 5, 2011)

Hello All,

I have built a system encompassing 6 Western Digital hard disk drives and I want to be able to spin them down when they are inactive. I have setup FreeBSD on a complete ZFS filesystem with logs and caches being written to an SSD drive.

The model of all the hard drives is WDC WD2002FYPS-0 5G05.

Does anyone know of any tools I could use to access the drive's firmware to modify the settings?

I want to be able to let the drives power down and have the SSD write the cache/logs only when the drives come online.

Any ideas?

Thanks for your time and help,

atwinix


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## aragon (Jan 5, 2011)

atwinix said:
			
		

> Does anyone know of any tools I could use to access the drive's firmware to modify the settings?


Have you tried atacontrol(8) or camcontrol(8)?


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## atwinix (Jan 10, 2011)

Great, thanks Aragon.  I will try those two programs. Someone else recommended using hdparm (on Linux) to modify the firmware of the drive's settings and its been proved to work rather well.  So, I'm looking for a port similar to that.


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