How do I find out which application prevents the drive from going to sleep

Question

I have 3 SATA HDDs in my server. The first one is a SSD system drive, and the other two (in JBOD) are being used to store some data (accessed via Samba). Most of the time when there are no requests, those two data drives can go to sleep. However only one of those two does.

I have already set the noatime flag in fstab for both drives and Im pretty sure that there's no cron job accessing this drive. I also set the spindown timeout to 10 minutes (hdparm -S 128 command) for both.

Is there a way how do I determine which application still accesses the drive and preventing it from going to sleep?

I wouldn't normally care whether the drive is sleeping or not, but as this is a home server, setting those two drives asleep is worth saving some energy. The OS is Ubuntu Server 10.04.

Thanks for tips.

Answer 1

You could try powertop.

Another thing to try is to check which processes have files open on the filesystem in question. See the tools "lsof" and "fuser".

Answer 2

I've also heard good things about powertop.

However, you could also look at iotop (found on newer distros). iotop also help you identify what programs are writing to disk.

(It's also generally useful to see how much io a given process is doing.)

Good luck.

Answer 3

I believe the drive handles this.. Doesnt hdparm edit the harddrives conf???

I used the exact same configuration to put my disks to sleep.. Movies/Music/Pictures worked great, a small 40gb disk for my OS and logs :D

i know that NFS keeps the disks alive, writing logs also.. basically any binary that needs or could stat a file on the underlying disks would keep them spinning

Take a look at what your storing on these disks.. other than static files and the applications which work refer to them..