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I have a software RAID 5 array (mdadm under Debian Linux) that has been up for the better part of a decade and has seen it's fair share of drive failures. I've always been leery about setting up a "hot spare" for various reasons but first and foremost is that I've always assumed the drive would spin up and sit idle. I seems counter-intuitive to me to keep a drive spinning that may sit for months or years before it's called upon, unnecessarily logging hours of mechanical wear and tear.

1) Will mdadm will spin down hot spares until they are called upon?

2) Assuming that it doesn't, is there a straightforward way to manage this?

Obviously I wouldn't want the drive to spin down again once it's pulled into my array so setting a timeout with hdparm seems like a bad idea.

I'm well aware of the many other posts/threads flaming the OPs about spinning down drives in their arrays so I want to be clear that I DO NOT have any interest in spinning down the active drives in the array, only the spare(s).

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I tried to spin down spare disk with hdparm -y that is a part of mdadm array but it seems that mdadm scrubbing wake it up.

I think it is better to remove spare disk from array if you want to spin them down.

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  • Unfortunately for my original use case, I think that your proposition is the only truly acceptable answer and is what I reverted to doing to solve my issue.
    – julienj
    Commented Dec 28, 2019 at 21:48

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