Of course you can always change the timeout or disable auto-spindown again later on. to set a reasonable idle timeout of 20 minutes on the harddisk, use:Ģ41 to 251 specify from 1 to 11 units of 30 minutes, for timeouts from 30 minutes to 5.5 hours.

But fortunately most USB3.0-SATA-cases seem to support the required SATA command.Į.g. Unfortunately many older USB2.0-PATA/SATA-adapters do not support the required SATA command, although even decade-old harddisks do support it. So no OpenWrt service has to be run in the background for this and 'hdparm' could even be uninstalled after setting this parameter. Its actually just a command line interface for a built-in harddisk function. This tool permanently saves a spindown timer on the harddisk itself, using standardized SATA disk commands (the harddisk will then remember that spindown-timer value, even if turned off, even after a restart and even if attached to a different device). Both require installing optional packages on OpenWrt.

There are different options, to automatically spin down the motor of the attached harddisk after a certain time of inactivity. when using a home-edition harddisk (instead of a 24×7-datacenter edition). Either because you want to have it quiet in your room during nighttime or to increase lifetime of the harddisk (e.g. If you want to use OpenWrt as a permanent NAS, you might want to spin down the harddisk motor during times of inactivity.

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