kern/140752: HDD power-off procedure is not clean

[Denis]

>Number:         140752
>Category:       kern
>Synopsis:       HDD power-off procedure is not clean
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       non-critical
>Priority:       low
>Responsible:    freebsd-bugs
>State:          open
>Quarter:        
>Keywords:       
>Date-Required:
>Class:          change-request
>Submitter-Id:   current-users
>Arrival-Date:   Sat Nov 21 11:50:01 UTC 2009
>Closed-Date:
>Last-Modified:
>Originator:     Denis
>Release:        7.2-production
>Organization:
>Environment:
Fujitsu-Siemens S6410 laptop
Hitachi HTS545016B9A300 SATA HDD (Travelstar 5K500.B family) 
>Description:
After power-down (halt -p) a loud enough "clink" sound is heard from the HDD suggesting it is performing emergency head unload. Such sound is NEVER heard when shutting down WinXP.
I am afraid that this causes excessive stress to a modern HDD.
The specification for Travelstar 5K500.B at

http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/013B2CE7D7CBD07586257609007A40A3/$file/TS5K500.B_OEMSpecification_EAmodelRev10.pdf

declares that emergency head unload count is limited to 20,000.
Possibly there is no emergency unload, but the sound is very unpleasant.

P.S. my previous HDD died after 1 year of daily use of FreeBSD-6.3 on the same laptop.

>How-To-Repeat:

>Fix:
Could ata driver issue Sleep or Standby command at power-down as recommended in the above document?

>Release-Note:
>Audit-Trail:
>Unformatted: