How To Install hd-idle on CentOS 7
Introduction
In this tutorial we learn how to install hd-idle
on CentOS 7.
What is hd-idle
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 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 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.
We can use yum
or dnf
to install hd-idle
on CentOS 7. In this tutorial we discuss both methods but you only need to choose one of method to install hd-idle.
Install hd-idle on CentOS 7 Using yum
Update yum database with yum
using the following command.
After updating yum database, We can install hd-idle
using yum
by running the following command:
Install hd-idle on CentOS 7 Using dnf
If you don’t have dnf installed you can install DNF on CentOS 7 first.
Update yum database with dnf
using the following command.
After updating yum database, We can install hd-idle
using dnf
by running the following command:
How To Uninstall hd-idle on CentOS 7
To uninstall only the hd-idle
package we can use the following command:
References
Summary
In this tutorial we learn how to install hd-idle
on CentOS 7 using yum
and dnf
.