Hey guys,
I have a setup of four HDDs mounted to a QUAD SATA head on a Raspberry Pi 4. Currently I have the problem that my HDDs keep spinning after powering down my raspbian installation. All LEDs are off (except a green LED on the SATA hat and the red power LED on the Pi).
Why is this happening and how can I prevent this behaviour.
Regards,
Frogtime
I’m sorry that this has happened. But the information you’ve provided is so limited that I can’t locate the problem.
I have currently no idea where I can start looking for more details. Therefore, I describe you what I did so far:
All drives are visible and can be mounted as expected. The only issues is that they keep spinning when the raspberry pi 4 is powered off.
Can you tell me where I can look for further details?
Regards,
Frogtime
Thank you for describing your problem in detail. I’ll try to find a solution and let you know.
with my phone I can fully shutdown the powerplug and reconnect to start my RPI, my RPI is in garage).Seeing the same issue, main difference in my setup is that I only have one hard drive, I installed OMV using the setup script they provide, and I didn’t update the firmware (because the forum post detailing the process said not to).
There is some useful information on this page about the spin down, its another product that uses the same jms561 controller:
https://wiki.odroid.com/accessory/add-on_boards/xu4_cloudshell2/firmware_upgrade
The spin down time on the drives can be set using the firmware upgrade tool, the command is:
./JMS561FwUpdate -d /dev/sda -t 5
Where -t 5 would be for 5 minutes, they mention that 1 and 2 do not work.
I used this approach and my drives do spin down, not sure if this is a fix for all or not.
Hey @quadnas,
thanks for the hint. That helped for the automatic spin down.
But this didn’t solve the problem of the spinning HDDs after powering off the raspberry pi.
I found the solution to add the following systemd unit:
[Unit]
Description=Handles all initialzitations of the HDDs.
Wants=rockpi-sata.service
After=rockpi-sata.service[Service]
Type=simple
RemainAfterExit=true
Restart=on-failure
ExecStartPre=/bin/sleep 30
ExecStart=/bin/bash /usr/bin/hdd_init.sh
ExecStop=/bin/bash /usr/bin/hdd_shutdown.sh[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
The shutdown script unmounted the partitions and called the following command:
hdparm -y /dev/sda
That did the trick for me.
I hope that helps you guys.
@frogtime Cool! Could you please explain it in detail how you did that with that systemd approach for automatic spindown at shutdown? I’m just a linux noob 
I would also like to know what was in his hdd_init.sh and hdd_shutdown.sh and where does the above go? maybe in a file like quadnas.mount?
I have the same problem; after shutdown of the Pi the green light of the hat is still on and the disks are still spinning…
https://forum.radxa.com/t/hdds-keep-spinning-after-poweroff/3701/9
The method of frogtime looks useful. We can give it a try. @Joep
I think the problem is indeed the APM level of the disks @StephaneP. I wrote a systemd service file where the APM is set to 127. If the level is higher the disk won’t go to sleep.
My systemd .service file:
[Unit]
Description = service file for disk 1
After = disk1.mount
Requires = disk1.mount
[Service]
Type = oneshot
ExecStartPre = /usr/sbin/hdparm -S 12 /dev/disk/by-uuid/xxxxxxxxxxxxx
ExecStart = /usr/sbin/hdparm -B 127 /dev/disk/by-uuid/xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[Install]
WantedBy = multi-user.target
More information about this can be found here:
I’ll keep the link updated here because it’ll change in the near future. I will also add a shutdown script I am still working on but I think with setting the APM level, the disk will also stop on shutdown.
hdparm -B 127 /dev/sda