I'm building my marvelous Myth box at the moment and I've been thinking about keeping the discs spun down when the box isn't in use.

After a bit of searching around various man pages I came across the page for hdparm (written by some joker called Mark Lord ) which specifies a spin down period. But I've read on the net that it might not be enough what with logfiles and cron tasks and the like. Anyone care to shed some light on this, or do I have make do with constantly spinning discs?

If you can stop everything on the system that wants to WRITE to disc periodically, and mount all of the filesystems with "noatime" and "nodiratime" options, then the drives should stay spun down for extended periods of time.

So, kill off cron, atd, anacron, syslogd (no more log files -- who needs 'em on a mediaplayer anyway?), etc..

Cheers