Best place to spin down disk after boot?

[Stefan A. Deutscher]

Hi,

   I have a 5.1Release machine with currently four SCSI disks, out of
which I need only two at any given time (system and /home). The other
ones are an alternative system disk, and an OS/2 disk.

They are set to spin up by themselves or via start unit from the SCSI
controller, but I wish to spin down the unused ones. I understand that
frequent spin up/down or power cyles may reduce disk lifetime, but these
disks are never accessed, i.e. never mounted and never spun up again
while the system is running.

To reduce noise and heat production, I am going to spin down two SCSI
disks on one of my machines with 

  camcontrol stop -n da -u 0
  camcontrol stop -n da -u 2

(Odd enough, a 'camcontrol stop da0 does _not_ work, it needs separate
-n and -u specs.) To spin down the disks right after boot, I ponder
sticking things either in the /etc/rc.local (seems to be going out of
style though) or as a separate script in /etc/rc.d/.  Any thoughts on
that would be appreciated.


As these commands take a while to return with a success message I'd like
to do that in the background, and I wish to log it somewhere.

Is there 'the right' way to send the camcontrol messages to syslog or
the dmesg file (all true believers shall open their egg at the right
end!)?


Cheers, Stefan