Summary: Re: Spin down HDD after disk sync or before power off

[Alexander Best]

On Thu Oct 21 10, Bruce Cran wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Oct 2010 14:33:49 +0200
> Dag-Erling Smørgrav <des at des.no> wrote:
> 
> > The problem with setting a short idle timeout is that, on a typical
> > laptop or desktop system, you end up spinning the disk down and back
> > up several hundred times a day, which increases power consumption, I/O
> > latency and wear.
> 
> Do we think our users are silly enough to set a short timeout of just a
> few minutes?  I'd think most would use a setting of 20-30 minutes at
> a minimum. I never did understand why there were so many warnings;
> after all, some laptops even come with a default APM scheme in their
> HDDs that powers the disk down after 7 seconds!

personally i still think something like the attached patch would be nice to
have. there's a chance users might type the following:

'atacontrol spindown device 10'

thinking the timeout value is measured in minutes. although this gets mentioned
in atacontrol(4) it might still be worth reminding the user that he/she is
performing actions which could damage the hardware.

cheers.
alex

> 
> -- 
> Bruce Cran

-- 
a13x
-------------- next part --------------
diff --git a/sbin/atacontrol/atacontrol.c b/sbin/atacontrol/atacontrol.c
index 4354ddf..75a131a 100644
--- a/sbin/atacontrol/atacontrol.c
+++ b/sbin/atacontrol/atacontrol.c
@@ -317,6 +317,10 @@ ata_spindown(int fd, const char *dev, const char *arg)
 
 	if (arg != NULL) {
 		tmo = strtoul(arg, NULL, 0);
+		if (tmo < 600)
+			warnx("setting spindown timeout below 10 minutes is \
+			      not recommended (see EXAMPLES section of \
+			      atacontrol(8))\n");
 		if (ioctl(fd, IOCATASSPINDOWN, &tmo) < 0)
 			err(1, "ioctl(IOCATASSPINDOWN)");
 	} else {