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Last week I bought a thinkpad T430 with a 500GB HDD and added a 128GB SSD to it. Then I installed Ubuntu on the SSD and I'm using it, while there is a Windows8 pre-installed on the HDD and I never used and never will use it. I want to turn the HDD completely off, because when it is turned on, it decreases the battery life and also it makes some noises (standard spinning sound of HDD). I tried removing the related fstab entries, but it doesn't turned off even in the next boot.

Is there any solution to turn off the HDD without opening the laptop and removing it physically?

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    Before you completely turn off that HDD you should make sure that you dont boot from it, and that you dont have your BIOS on it.
    – Takkat
    Nov 16, 2013 at 8:34

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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Try something like sudo hdparm -B 127 -Y /dev/sdb, assuming /dev/sdb is the HDD.

If that works, you can experiment with the /etc/hdparm.conf settings to enable aggressive power management on the HDD, put it to sleep/standby quickly, and turn the power off.

The file is well commented, and has a few examples. Also check out man hdparm for better understanding of the options.

Something like the following should quickly put the HDD to sleep:

/dev/disk/by-id/...{
    apm = 127
    sleep
}

To properly identify the HDD in /dev/disk/by-id/ look at the output of
sudo hdparm /dev/sdb | head

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  • Thanks a lot! hdparm command did the work! I edited the hdparm.conf file and will post the final result whenever I rebooted the laptop ;)
    – Danial Behzadi
    Nov 16, 2013 at 20:30
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Check your /etc/fstab file for the line containing your windows partition(s) and comment those out so they no longer automount at startup, although they SHOULD still appear in the list of devices at the side in Nautilus but require a password to mount...

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