Package: hd-idle Version: 1.05+0~20210718065952.14+wheezy~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+0~20210718065952.14+wheezy~1.gbp034389_i386.deb Size: 14876 SHA256: b300e4ed15a1c3c3140a0954caaa73833cf00b6d33ba1841ba2473bbfe236ca7 SHA1: 0426b3a3ad6540f1ae210e7175c3d340f716a9c8 MD5sum: 5d5268f7e7a2be4edd870eaa536c230a 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.