The scsi-idle package contains small programs to start and stop SCSI disks
and a daemon that spins down drives when idle. You must apply the supplied
kernel patch in order to add drive spin-up functionality. NB: scsi-idle will
currently only spin down 1 scsi disk at a time. please feel free to patch!

To install: 
1. obtain kernel and untar in /usr/src

2. apply the kernel patch
$ cd /usr/src/linux-2.4.23
$ patch -p1 < scsi-idle-2.4.23.patch

3. install new kernel (read README from kernel) and reboot using it

4. run "make" to create scsi-idle utilities
$ cd ~/scsi-idle-2.4.23
$ make

5. run "make install" as root
# cd ~/scsi-idle-2.4.23
# make install

To use:
To immediately stop scsi drive /dev/sda:
# /usr/local/sbin/scsi-stop /dev/sda

To immediately start scsi drive /dev/sda:
# /usr/local/sbin/scsi-start /dev/sda

To automatically stop scsi drive /dev/sda after 30 minutes of inactivity:
# /usr/local/sbin/scsi-idle /dev/sda 1800
This loads the scsi-idle daemon which monitors drive's idle time and stops the
drive accordingly. On access, the drive spins back up, and the daemon will
notice this and continue monitoring.

Just place the line to start the daemon in your init scripts. 

Read the rest of this README for some more hints with scsi-idle...

I do not know of a patch for linux kernel 2.6. I will work on this when I
get a chance.. 

Email me (Daniel Sterling) at dan@lost-habit.com if you have something to
say. Patches welcome :)

December 2003:

Thanks to Dirk Jagdmann ( doj at cubic org ) for fixing up the Makefile and
includes.

Updated against stock 2.4.23.

After a long hiatus, my email works again. If you tried to email me while it
was out, I apologize. Try again if you like. All emails welcome.

August 2002:

Updated the patch for stock 2.4.19 (this was trivial).

Commented out logging of spin-down, as this will spin the drive back up
as your log file is written to!

Gernot Zander had changed the scsi-idle daemon to send SCSI_STOP only
once, ever. Unfortunately, this meant if the drive spun back up, the daemon
wouldn't spin it back down again. I added a line so now the daemon notices
if the drive has spun back up, and will spin it back down again after the
timeout (as one would expect).

I am using this to spin down my main drive, mounted on /. It seems to work
alright for me. In order for the drive to sit mostly idle:
I told syslogd not to write -- MARK -- (syslogd -m 0)
crond only runs jobs once per day (for locate etc)
no atd
a tmpfs for dnetc's buffers and ntpd's drift file (copy to tmpfs on startup,
and from it to disk daily and on shutdown)

Note that smbfs likes to access the local disk, so if you have a program
running on a smbfs mounted drive, your local disk might not sit idle.

Note that this still is a "dirty hack", so use it at your own risk. It works
for me.

Let me know if it works, or doesn't, for you, or if you have suggestions or
improvements.

Daniel Sterling (dan@lost-habit.com)

*********************************************************************
Changed the patch to work with 2.4.18. Because the kernel's scsi
structure has changed a lot, the old concept of starting the disk
doesn't work anymore. To start the disk sd_init_onedisk is called
instead, which re-reads the sector size, capacity and so on, too,
but this shouldn't hurt. The SCSI command, which caused the
access, is saved during the init.
Instead of running into the NOT READY error and spinning up the
drive then, the state of the drive is saved, so the spinup is
done _before_ any other command is sent to the drive.
Added logging output of up and down.
Changed the scsi-idle daemon not to send the stop command
again and again, but only once, if the idle time is exceeded.

WARNING: This is something like a dirty hack. I'm far away
of understanding all the SCSI stuff in the kernel source, I just
looked for a place to drop this in, I don't know if there are
side effects. Don't blame me if it causes data lost or crashes!

I don't recommand it at devices the system itself is running
at. I use it for a drive where I keep archive files (and there
is a backup of it), and to spin down a drive with windows,
if I run linux on this machine. This works fine at least for me.

Tell me if you have problems or improvements.

Gernot Zander <hifi at scorpio dot in-berlin de> 2002-07-31
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Changed the kernel patch so it would work with the 2.2.10 kernel.  Also had to
fix the user space programs to work with the new kernel includes. 
scsi-start/scsi-stop is now a single program that looks at its name to see
what effect it should have.

Trent Piepho <xyzzy@speakeasy.org>
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I patched this so it would apply to the 2.0.36 kernel.  I also made two
programs called 'scsi-start' and 'scsi-stop' which will start/stop a SCSI
device.  You don't need to apply the patch to use these programs.  The patch
is needed if you want to use the idle timeout program, scsi-idle, or if you
want your drives to spin up automatically when accessed.

Note that the auto spin up part of the patch doesn't work so well.  If you
access a spun down drive directly via the device file, e.g "cat /dev/sda1" or
"mount /dev/sdb2" you might end up hanging the SCSI bus and have to reset!

Trent Piepho <xyzzy@u.washington.edu>
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I attempted to get a hold of the originator of this patch a while back,
but was completely unsuccessful, so here's my update.

I've simply updated this patch so it can be easily be applied to 
kernel 2.0.30 source. I've not tested it on any other kernel versions and
make no guarantees. I've had a bit of trouble with one of my drives,
a Seagate ST51080N. It won't spin back up after being spun down. I have 
no idea why this is and probably won't look into it, since it's
not a very noisy drive.

Below is the original README file contents.

Matthew Jachimstal
jachim@jachsys.resnet.mtu.edu

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Original README:
----------------


`scsi-idle' is another attempt to spin down SCSI-disks after a period
of inactivity.  Some people have had trouble with my earlier patch, so
I'm trying to to things differently this time.

scsi-idle-x.y.z.patch is the kernel patch, where x.y.z is the kernel
version it was made for.  To apply the patch, cd to /usr/src and type:

$ patch -p <scsi-idle.x.y.z.patch

scsi-idle.c is a small user-level program which decides when to spin
down disks, compile it with:

$ gcc -o scsi-idle scsi-idle.c

When invoked with only one paramer -- a device name -- scsi-idle shows
how long the disk has been idle:

$ scsi-idle /dev/sda 
/dev/sda has been idle for 78 seconds

When invoked with two parameters, a device name and a timeout,
scsi-idle does one of two things.  A timeout of zero will spin down
the disk immediately, anything else will place the program in the
background, where it will monitor the disk and spin it down when it
has been idle for timeout seconds.

$ scsi-idle /dev/sda 0
[the disk will hopefully spin down]
$ scsi-idle /dev/sda 300
[starts scsi-idle in the background and spins down the disk after 5 minutes]

Any comments or bugreports are very welcome.  Have fun!

  /Christer (wingel@ctrl-c.liu.se)

DISCLAIMER: This stuff works for me, but I can't give you any
guarantees.  If it breaks something, it's not my fault.

Micro-FAQ:

1)  The disk keeps spinning up all the time

    If you're using scsi-idle on your root disk, it's probably
    spinning up all the time.  This is because `crond' runs `atrun' as
    a cron job every 10 minutes, and for each cron job, `crond' writes
    a temporary file which is saved to disk.  Making /tmp a ram-disk
    will probably cure this problem.  If you can survive without `at',
    just run `crontab -e' as root and comment out the line with
    `atrun' in it.  If you can live without `crond' altogheter, feel
    free to comment out the line which starts it in `/etc/rc.d/rc.M'
    (at least, this is where you find it on Slackware system).

2) The disk still spins up but not as often

   There are quite a few programs which access the disk every now and
   then, `crond' does some periodic housekeeping once every hour which
   might spin up the disk, `sendmail' might also be a culprit.  Other
   than that, if you're sitting on a busy network, broadcasts, bad
   network packets and whatnot can cause `syslogd' to make an entry in
   the /var/log/messages-file which (of course) will make the disk
   spin up again.  If you have a system which is short on memory,
   random events (such as network activity, timer interrupts or the
   phase of the moon) might cause a program to get swapped in which
   will (surprise) start the disk.  Since Linux is a multitasking,
   multiuser system, there really is no way that you can win, the disk
   will spin up every now and then.

3) What use is it then?

   Well, it's perfect if you have a new, quiet and power-efficient
   SCSI or IDE disk as your root disk and have some old noisy monsters
   for FTP, storage, or backup purposes.  Personally, I have a DEC
   RZ25 (not all that new or quiet, but the newest one I have) for my
   root and /usr partitions, a Fujitsu full height 5"25 for my /home
   partition and an old Maxtor disk which sounds like jet engine when
   running.  My root disk runs continuously, the home-disk spins down
   after 30 minutes and the FTP-disk spins down after 3 minutes.  Then
   there are all those disks that I connect externally every now that
   tend to be a bit on the noisy side too.

4) How is it different from the old scsi-idle (1.2.x) stuff?
   (not really interesting but some people were wondering)

   The main changes are that I've moved the `stop-disks' functionality
   to a user process and implemented a new SCSI-ioctl to stop or start
   a SCSI-unit immediately (this works for any SCSI-device).  This
   way, it's much easier to change the behaviour of the idle-
   algorithms since I don't have to recompile the kernel and reboot
   each time.  The functions which restarts disks has also undergone
   major changes.  Most importantly, it has been changed to check the
   return status from the drive and if the drive reports "NOT READY",
   the function tries to restart it. This way, disks which have spun
   down for any reason are automatically restarted. I have an external
   disk with a flakey power supply, and quite naturally this disk
   doesn't spin up on power up; the old version just set a flag when
   a disk was spun down and got confused when a disk which was
   supposed to be running wasn't.