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I am running Ubuntu 14.04.2 with ZFS on Linux. As I ran out of SATA ports on my Asus M5A78L-M/USB3, I bought a Dell PERC H200 card and crossflashed it to LSI 9211-8i P19 IT mode firmware to passthrough the drives transparently.

This works like a charm with the mpt2sas driver with SMART commands and so on, despite one drawback:

I spin down my pool drives automatically after a period of time with hdparm -y /dev/sdx. Before I got the H200 card, all my drives were connected to the motherboard and when I shut down the system, the system was shut down immediately without spinning up the drives.

Now, all drives that are connected to the H200 are spinned up first and the system does not shut down until all drives are spinned up.

So my question is: How can I prevent Ubuntu from spinning up my disks, that are connected to the H200, before shutting down the system?

Maybe it's a standby/shutdown command that is send to the drives that causes the H200 to wake up the drives.

Massimo
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fmetz
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  • Given the type of system you're running (PERC H200 crossflashed to a LSI 9211, and ZFS) you might get better answers to this over on [sf]. You can "flag" the question for moderator attention and request a migration; please *do not* repost the same question on another Stack Exchange site. – user Mar 20 '15 at 10:22
  • Yeah I was not sure about where to put this question. Ask Ubuntu also seems to be a good choice. I flagged the question and asked for migration to Server Fault. How long does this normally take? – fmetz Mar 20 '15 at 15:15
  • Hard to say how long it'll take, since it's a manual process. A moderator will look into the request and might discuss it with the Server Fault moderators before taking active action. Expect anywhere between an hour and a day, though probably closer to an hour than to a day, and *possibly* more. Don't worry, someone will get to it, and if in the meantime the question gathers answers here there's little harm. – user Mar 20 '15 at 15:19
  • It'll probably get kicked back - the fact that you're using consumer hardware probably won't go well with them. Let me check with a mod there. – Journeyman Geek Mar 20 '15 at 23:55
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    I'd probably question why you want your disks to spin down in the first place... But I don't have an answer. – ewwhite Mar 21 '15 at 00:05

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Short of patching your kernel, I don't think you can. During shutdown, the scsi disk driver issues a SYNCHRONIZE CACHE command to flush the disk's internal cache. This will cause the drive to spin up, then the drive is spun down again before shutting down.

psusi
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