ZFS on USB / Sound on alienware m11x

[Craig Whipp]

 On Mon, 18 Apr 2011 16:58:28 +0000, Gautham Ganapathy wrote:
> Hi
>
> I am trying out FreeBSD on ZFS using the PC-BSD 8.2 installer. I have
> it installed on a Western Digital USB HDD connected to an Alienware
> m11x laptop. It seems to work well except that once in a while, any
> application performing a write freezes for a few seconds (around 15 
> or
> so) and looking at top shows their states to be in zio. Is this
> because it was installed on a USB drive?
>

 I've experienced the same behavior on my external USB WD drive.  I
 found that many of the Western Digital external drives will spin-down
 after some period of time.  The wait you're experiencing is probably
 the time it takes to spin-up.  WD has a utility to disable the
 spin-down feature.  It's windows only, however.

 http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=304&sid=17&lang=en

 - Craig
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