Spin down USB HDD on Raspberry Pi error

I’m currently running Raspbian Jessie on a Pi 3, and I have it all set up inside the Nextcloud box. I don’t want my drive spinning all day long and I want it to spin down when there is inactivity for 30 minutes or an hour. Issuing “hdparm -S241 /dev/sda” results in this error:

SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[]:  70 00 01 00 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 00 00 1d 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

Any ideas? Doing the same thing with udisks proves unfruitful too

Since the Drives are connected via USB, you cant spin them down via the Pi. But most HDD Drives handle this from Drives Firmware self. All my Drives spin down automatically after some time, mostly 20-30 Minutes. With some Drives, you can control this via special Programs under Windows.

That’s what I have figured unfortunately…I was just hoping there was something that could be done with the WD drive provided in the nextcloud box

Hi!

I use hd-idle.

http://www.foxplex.com/sites/festplatten-standby-im-leerlauf-mit-hdparm-und-hd-idle/

I was just doing work nearby it yesterday and realized that it actually was spinning down on its own! Whenever I was near the thing it was always running but now I realize there is a spindown after X amount of time of inactivity in that hard drive :slight_smile: