Maybe I wasn't clear, that's all I'm using. It's not working the way I want. When I execute it, the HD starts to spin up, spins down, and everything shuts down. Everything works fine except that I want the HD to not spin up in the first place if isn't already up when executing `s2ram`.

If `s2ram` works the way you want, why not just use it all the time?  Redirect calls to other sleep utils to `s2ram` , perhaps?

I have an external harddrive. If I put my computer to sleep with `s2ram`, it spins down and only spins up when I want to access it, which is fine. However, if I haven't used it by the time I'm done, when I run the sleep command the HD first spins up just to spin back down two seconds later. I'd like the HD to do nothing if it's already on standby.

I'm using Debian jessie. Any ideas?

External HD spins up then down when going to sleep