Temporarily Parking the Hard Disk Heads

Hello,



Using a spinning hard disk, this is bad, even if put to sleep.



I don't believe modern disks have a special "parking position" but you could
stop them spinning.



You can put the disk directly into standby or suspend mode using "hdparm -y"
respective "hdparm -Y". hdparm is included with busybox, with the needed
parameter, if I remember correctly.

Another idea would be to set the spindown timer very low (hdparm -S), so
that the disk spins down after maybe 5 seconds of inactivity. But you have
to ensure that no further accesses occur. Then you only have to stop
activity on the disk before vibrations occur. But it won't be good for your
disk as it shouldn't vibrate while spinning...

Hope this helps,

Sebastian

I believe they still have a parking position, but you don't have to manually
position them.  They snap the heads to a safe location using internal stored
power when power is removed.