How to check why a spinning disk is not sleeping?

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1

From gnome-disks, it is confirmed that the disk:

  • Standby timeout is 10 minutes
  • APM is 127 (spinning down permited)

smartd is enabled with default settings.

But the drive is never spinning down.

If I do a “Standby Now” in gnome-disks, the drive can go to standby without issues. And it will not spin up without accessing it (by ls /mnt/device, or similar).

My first target to check is polling interval of smartd, but I cannot locate where it can be changed.

How can I find out what is accessing the device so that it will not goto standby ?

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2

You can check this with lsof or fuser.

lsof /mnt/device
fuser -v /mnt/device
3

Thanks for the suggestions.

I wake up the drive and run these two commands from time to time.

Returns nothing.

4

I almost remember that there was a process like a daemon who runs every few minutes (might be ten) preventing a drive to sleep. I’m not using hdds for quite some time anymore and ssds never sleep.

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5

I suspect smartd is polling regularly. But I cannot find out where to set the interval.

6

In /etc/smartmontools/smartd.conf (see also: man 5 smartd.conf)

8

I cannot find to control polling interval from that man page.

Please help to high light the main points to me.

9

Sorry, you are right, it defaults to 30 minutes and I also didn’t find a way to configure it.

10

If it is 30 minutes, then my drive should goto standby before the next polling, as it is 10 minutes.

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