Package: hd-idle Version: 1.05+0~20230701114823.17+jessie~1.gbp034389 Architecture: amd64 Maintainer: Christian Mueller Installed-Size: 71 Depends: libc6 (>= 2.14) Homepage: http://hd-idle.sf.net Priority: extra Section: utils Filename: pool/main/h/hd-idle/hd-idle_1.05+0~20230701114823.17+jessie~1.gbp034389_amd64.deb Size: 14076 SHA256: 54c7417249e3757fdb3193b77e07ea92a2ab99a6882011ac857eaac11e688f43 SHA1: d7c3063d831065f7a348a4a600285cc51039e445 MD5sum: 9ebdcb0bcbb2ead27cb8cb9822e1d4bd Description: Spin down idle [USB] hard disks hd-idle is a utility program for spinning-down external disks after a period of idle time. Since most external IDE disk enclosures don't support setting the IDE idle timer, a program like hd-idle is required to spin down idle disks automatically. . A word of caution: hard disks don't like spinning up too often. Laptop disks are more robust in this respect than desktop disks but if you set your disks to spin down after a few seconds you may damage the disk over time due to the stress the spin-up causes on the spindle motor and bearings. It seems that manufacturers recommend a minimum idle time of 3-5 minutes, the default in hd-idle is 10 minutes. . One more word of caution: hd-idle will spin down any disk accessible via the SCSI layer (USB, IEEE1394, ...) but it will not work with real SCSI disks because they don't spin up automatically. Thus it's not called scsi-idle and I don't recommend using it on a real SCSI system unless you have a kernel patch that automatically starts the SCSI disks after receiving a sense buffer indicating the disk has been stopped. Without such a patch, real SCSI disks won't start again and you can as well pull the plug.