ProLiant Servers (ML,DL,SL)
1748202 Members
2962 Online
108759 Solutions
New Discussion юеВ

Re: DL380 How to keep ext Hard drive or USB turned on

 
SOLVED
Go to solution
Ron Eaker
New Member

DL380 How to keep ext Hard drive or USB turned on

Have a DL380 running Red Hat 4.0. Problem, have a Seagate 500g Ext HD attached via USB port on the 380. The HD was formatted NTFS to Linux and mounted as Read-write. If the HD is not used for a few hours and then I try to write to it,seems like the HD goes to sleep and the system makes the HD Read Only and can't do anything else without unmounting then remounting.
Is there a way to make the USB ports stay alive all the time or keep the Ext HD on all the time like on a PC? Want to use the HD for Disk backups.
Thanks
Ron
3 REPLIES 3
Matti_Kurkela
Honored Contributor
Solution

Re: DL380 How to keep ext Hard drive or USB turned on

Is this one of Seagate's "Free Agent" external HDs?

If so, you're absolutely correct in your diagnosis: the HD does indeed go to sleep without telling the system about it. The Linux storage people puzzled this one out back in last May or so:

http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/FAQ/DealWithAutoSpinDownOnSeagateFreeAgent

The first solution mentioned in the above URL (running "echo 1 > /sys/block/sda/device/scsi_disk*/allow_restart" after the disk is connected or the system is rebooted) might not work on RedHat Enterprise Linux 4 because the RHEL 4's kernel version is so old it might not have this feature. (But if the good folks at RedHat have backported this feature in their kernel patches, good for them!)

The second method (using the sdparm command) might be more useful, as it does not require kernel-level support.

In short:
If the drive has already gone to sleep, run first:
/usr/bin/sdparm --command=start /dev/sd[YOUR_DEVICE]

Then run this to tell the drive it must not go to sleep any more:
/usr/bin/sdparm --clear STANDBY -6 /dev/sd[YOUR_DEVICE]

The third method would be to connect this drive temporarily to a Windows system and using the FreeAgent Desktop software (available from Seagate) to disable the drive's auto-sleep feature.

Link to Seagate's download page:
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=freeagent-downloads&vgnextoid=3723b5b59b7d5110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD

MK
MK
Ron Eaker
New Member

Re: DL380 How to keep ext Hard drive or USB turned on

It is the Freeagent and thanks for the advice. Not sure if the utility is still on the HD due to reformatting the drive to Linux. will look at the other solutions first.
Again thanks
Ron Eaker
New Member

Re: DL380 How to keep ext Hard drive or USB turned on

Sorry misread your last line. thanks for the link.