Configure USB drive to spin down automatically about backup-pi HOT 3 OPEN

I've added a new geerlingguy.hdparm role on Ansible Galaxy for control over this parameter. I will also need to see about setting it on-the-fly or if I can get hdparm to read from its conf file... also need to verify things are working. Right now it looks like it'll take at least 30 min to an hour to format the 2 TB USB drive. It would take 4-6 hours if I formatted allowing the initialization to happen in the background!

from backup-pi.

To set spin-down on the fly:

# Enable power management on USB HDD.
sudo hdparm -B 127 /dev/sda
# Set spindown time to 10 minutes.
sudo hdparm -S120 /dev/sda

You can check the status of the drive using:

sudo hdparm -C /dev/sda

(Outputs something like active/idle or standby if it's spun down).

from backup-pi.

Looks like this works nicely with the following in /etc/hdparm.conf:

/dev/sda {
    spindown_time = 120
}

from backup-pi.