Monitors hard disk activities and spins down idle disks.

hd-idle is an excellent tool but it doesn't work well on my system that has several HDDs in USB enclosures. These enclosures apparently spin up disks almost immediately after they have been spun down. Not sure, but this is the most plausible explanation that I came up with. Another problem is that if a disk has been spun down by hd-idle it doesn't return its status anymore (for example to hdparm -C command). So smartd service doesn't get status of spun down disks and wakes them up. On the other hand I found that hdparm -y command spins down my disks without any issues, except that spun down and rotating disks have the same status ("standby").

• Monitors disk read/write activity.
• Spins down idle disks.
• Detects added/removed disks.
• Allows to use well known tools like hdparm to spin down disks.
• Doesn't rely on querying disk status.

• Does produce disk activities on system partition by writing messages to the system journal and executing shell commands. But it seems like everybody has system partitions on SSDs these days, so being completely "silent" might be not that important anymore.

• Make "spin down" and "check up" functions generic.
• Periodically run SMART diagnostic tool for active disks.
• Experiment with different strategies to minimize number of spin up/spin down cycles.

sudo pip3 install git+https://github.com/sekogan/hdmon.git
sudo hdmon-install

Edit /etc/hdmon.yml to your preference.

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable hdmon
sudo systemctl start hdmon

To uninstall:

sudo systemctl stop hdmon
sudo systemctl disable hdmon
sudo hdmon-uninstall
sudo pip3 uninstall hdmon
sudo rm /etc/hdmon.yml

Inspired by:

• hd-idle
• another hd-idle
• amdgpu-fan