How to power down WD RED drives on Linux manually?

Revan

Explorer
Joined
Mar 22, 2017
Messages
81
Does anyone know how to power down WD Red drives on Linux to be able to remove them from the drive bay while the PC is running?

If i unmount all partitions of the drive i am not really sure if the drive is still spinning.
I assume it still does do spinning.

When i use the following command to turn the drive in sleep mode to enforce the spinning of the drive:
Code:
sudo hdparm -Y /dev/sdc


The /var/log/kern.log shows that the drive is automatically waking up again:
Code:
Jan 27 ... kernel: [...] ata6.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6
Jan 27 ... kernel: [...] ata6.00: waking up from sleep
Jan 27 ... kernel: [...] ata6: hard resetting link
Jan 27 ... kernel: [...] ata6: SATA link up 6.0 Gbps (SStatus 133 Scontrol 300)
Jan 27 ... kernel: [...] ata6.00: configured for UDMA/133
Jan 27 ... kernel: [...] ata6: EH complete


The following command gives the following output:
Code:
sudo hdparm -c /dev/sdc

/dev/sdc
IO_support=1   (32-bit)


There is no reliable info about the status of the spinning of the drive.
Only the temperature might be a hint, it is showing 26 °C while another drive in the bay which data is written to shows 30°C.
Is it safe to just remove the drive from the drive bay?
 

Revan

Explorer
Joined
Mar 22, 2017
Messages
81
Thanks a lot. That works perfectly.

EDIT:
Btw, what i found out.
If i use the lowercase option -y instead of -Y the drive at least goes into standby mode.
Code:
sudo hdparm -Y /dev/sdc


That's at least what the command
Code:
sudo smartctl -i -n standby /dev/c

says.

It gives the following output
Code:
smartctl 6.6 ..
Copyright ...

Device is in STANDBY mode, exit(2)
 
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