How to turn off background media scan?

[jihe]

Hi, I recently acquired some Seagate savvio 10k.5 ST9900805SS and constellation ES.2 ST33000650SS sas drives, with EMC firmware. After reformatting to 512B sector size I can use them in windows. However the drives are actually much noisier at idle than load, they are constantly seeking and scrubbing it seems. I believe this may have something to do with the constant background media scans, so what can I do to turn off that feature?

[jihe]

Figured it out reading the sdparm documentation. For others who may be interested, it is
sdparm --clear=EN_BMS --save /dev/sdX

[fzabkar]

Thanks for the heads up.

[p.h.]

There is an alternative. A tool in smartmontools, which is able to turn the BMS on/off - smartctl.
First check if it is supported by the drive. For sda run:

Code:

smartctl /dev/sda -c

and check if output states "Auto Offline data collection on/off support.". If it's supported run:

Code:

smartctl /dev/sda --offlineauto=off

Man page: https://www.smartmontools.org/browser/trunk/smartmontools/smartctl.8.in

As background media scans will no longer be performed run immediate offline scans and longDST on a regular basis.

Code:

smartctl -t offline /dev/sda
smartctl -t long /dev/sda