This HDD for some reason interprets hdparm -S
setting differently than expected.
Normally if you specify hdparm -S
value in 1-240
range, it results in 5s times the value spindown timeout. There is no guarantee though that it will work exactly same way for all HDDs and WD20EARS happens to be one of the exceptions.
I was able to make it spindown in 10min by specifying hdparm -S 3
. I found the fix in this post.