I have a server at home with 16 drives in it. Im using mdadm on all the drives (i have 3 RAID5 arrays). Since 16 x 10w each is 160w of hard drives being powered on for no reason 90% of the time i would like the spin down the hard drives when not in use. Im using Ubuntu as well

I have made this script do set the hdparm commands on startup.

Code:
#!/bin/sh

case "$1" in
'start')
	sudo hdparm -S 241 /dev/sda1
	sudo hdparm -S 241 /dev/sdb1
	sudo hdparm -S 241 /dev/sdc1
	sudo hdparm -S 241 /dev/sdd1
	sudo hdparm -S 241 /dev/sde1
	sudo hdparm -S 241 /dev/sdf1
	sudo hdparm -S 241 /dev/sdg1
	sudo hdparm -S 241 /dev/sdh1
	sudo hdparm -S 241 /dev/sdi1
	sudo hdparm -S 241 /dev/sdj1
	sudo hdparm -S 241 /dev/sdk1
	sudo hdparm -S 241 /dev/sdl1
	sudo hdparm -S 241 /dev/sdm1
	sudo hdparm -S 241 /dev/sdn1
	sudo hdparm -S 241 /dev/sdo1
	sudo hdparm -S 241 /dev/sdp1
	;;
*)
	echo "Usage: $0 { start }"
	;;
esac
exit 0
Yeah i could take out the start bit, but eh lol.

Now the problem is that i find the disks still spinning after 30min sometimes. I think its SMART polling the drives? If i look on my Norco 4224 i see each little hdd activity light blink for all the drives at some point during the day (it probably does it a lot more as well). So how can i limit smart polling to once a day instead of every 4hours or even better, only when the drive is active.

Also would laptop mode on the hard drives help as well? Any other tips?

Thanks