Package: hd-idle Version: 1.05+0~20230701114828.17+jessie~1.gbp034389 Architecture: i386 Maintainer: Christian Mueller Installed-Size: 68 Depends: libc6 (>= 2.7) Homepage: http://hd-idle.sf.net Priority: extra Section: utils Filename: pool/main/h/hd-idle/hd-idle_1.05+0~20230701114828.17+jessie~1.gbp034389_i386.deb Size: 13794 SHA256: 81c42de9656b80898d25e2f42a587f9e3322f99a0e9f204652dfb8072f629eef SHA1: ee5c2cd8c034fbae71e2f6c6b3af8ff4fcb8c0df MD5sum: e12242b88e9d05ce1aa24cd8a34c8072 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.