Setting Standby Mode for ATA Disks

[Bruce Cran]

On 25 Jun 2004, at 17:51, Arne Schwabe wrote:

> Hi,
>
> is there a way to set the standby mode for ATA Disks
>
> Under linux hdparm -S seems to work:
>
>        -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.
>               Under such circumstances, the drive may take as long as 
> 30  sec-
>               onds  to respond to a subsequent disk access, though 
> most drives
>               are much quicker.  The encoding of the timeout value is 
> somewhat
>               peculiar.   A  value  of zero means "off".  Values from 
> 1 to 240
>               specify multiples of 5 seconds, for timeouts from 5  
> seconds  to
>               20  minutes.   Values from 241 to 251 specify from 1 to 
> 11 units
>               of 30 minutes, for timeouts from 30 minutes  to  5.5  
> hours.   A
>               value  of 252 signifies a timeout of 21 minutes, 253 
> sets a ven-
>               dor-defined timeout, and 255 is interpreted as 21  
> minutes  plus
>               15 seconds.
>
> I googled but I did not found anything like this for FreeBSD :/

ATAidle (http://www.cran.org.uk/bruce/software/ataidle.php and 
sysutils/ataidle in ports) does this.  Unfortunately due to a site 
redesign, the page seems to have been dropped from the google results; 
I'll have to add the keywords back in so it gets listed again!

--
Bruce Cran