[Birtybasset]

Hi all,

I'd like to turn my XBMC machine (Revo r3610) into a NAS that stays powered up 24/7.

Being a Yorkshire man I'm looking to keep power consumption to a minimum so was wondering if there's anyway I could power the internal HDD down when idle. But seeing as XBMC is currently installed to the internal HDD I thought this might not be possible or does the OS stay in RAM?

I've been googling and found hdparm. Is this included in XBMC live?

[darkscout]

Look up hdparm/sdparm and how to use it.

[magnetik]

I have had the same battles with my XS35 and external USB hard drives - after much messing around I found hdparm the solution to use. There seemed to be some confusion though with these utils not working over USB drives and/or to use sdparm instead (which didn't work for me).

I'm basically telling the drives themselves to power down (spin down) after X amount of time (15 mins in my case) - hdparm writes this data to the HDD itself in low-level sectors.

For the most part it works okay - once you have issued the commands at the shell and proven it works - you can add entires to /etc/hdparm.conf to make it stick over re-boots.

E.g.

$ hdparm /dev/sda1 -S 180

The '180' isn't seconds, the spin down time is a little weird, it's increments of 5 seconds up to values of 240. Best to read the man pages to understand correctly.