Prevent Linux from spinning up sleeping hard drives on shutdown?

[18358414]

Problem: if I have 6 hard drives spun down via `hdparm -y /dev/sd*`, whenever I shut down my Linux computer there's a period of about 12 seconds where each drive that was spun down is spun up again.  Since I'm shutting DOWN the system (as in power-off), those drives are spun up for a total of about 5 seconds before being spun down again.  At this point, I feel like it's better if I just flip the power switch instead of the proper shut-down because at least that way I'm not spinning up the drives needlessly (and I'm in a live CD environment so I can't damage my filesystem). 

 

Question: is there a way to prevent Linux from spinning up hard drives that have been spun down to avoid unnecessary wear when I'm shutting down the system?

 

edit: I believe this is because of a "synchronize cache" call on shutdown, but I have yet to find a way to skip that.

[AkIonSight]

This serverfault post might help

 

https://serverfault.com/questions/677133/prevent-hdds-from-spinning-up-before-shutdown-in-ubuntu-zol-sas2008-environment