Tanto o disco rígido quanto as fontes externas podem desativar um disco.
E, em teoria, a ponte USB para SATA pode ser uma terceira fonte.
De o manual ( man hdparm
na linha de comando):
-S Set the standby (spindown) timeout for the drive. This value is used by the drive to determine how long to wait (with no disk activity) before turning off the spindle motor to save power.
The encoding of the timeout value is somewhat peculiar. A value of zero means "timeouts are disabled": the device will not automatically enter standby mode. Values from 1 to 240 specify multiples of 5 seconds, yielding timeouts from 5 seconds to 20 minutes. Values from 241 to 251 specify from 1 to 11 units of 30 minutes, yielding timeouts from 30 minutes to 5.5 hours. A value of 252 signifies a timeout of 21 minutes. A value of 253 sets a vendor-defined timeout period between 8 and 12 hours, and the value 254 is reserved. 255 is interpreted as 21 minutes plus 15 seconds.
Observe que alguns drives mais antigos podem ter interpretações muito diferentes desses valores.
dparm -I /dev/sda | grep level
mostrará o valor atual do spindown, por exemplo: Advanced power management level: 254