How do put an ATA disk into sleep/standby mode?
Darren Pilgrim
dmp at bitfreak.org
Sat Sep 13 02:20:41 PDT 2003
On 2003.09.13 01:16:16 -0700, John-Mark Gurney <gurney_j at efn.org> wrote:
> Darren Pilgrim wrote this message on Thu, Sep 11, 2003 at 17:55 -0700:
> > In my workstation, running 5.1-R, I have two disks, one containing
> > FreeBSD, the other Windows. Since the Windows disk isn't used at
> > all when in FreeBSD, I would like to put it into standby or sleep
> > mode(whichever is necessary) to make it spin down, reducing heat and
> > noise production--both of which have become a real problem.
> >
> > This is at least technically possible, since spinning down a disk is
> > part of the APM sleep mode. The capabilities list atacontrol
> > reports for the disk in question shows power management and advanced
> > power management as being supported, and I've gotten Windows to spin
> > down this disk. I haven't had any luck figuring out how to do this
> > in FreeBSD, though.
> >
> > So how do I accomplish this?
>
> Well, in -current, sos has commited a frame work that will let a
> userland utility to send arbitrary commands to the disks, and so
> this will be possible from a utility.
I may just wait for 5.2 to work on this, then.
> I wanted this feature too, and I happen to be browsing around the ata
> spec and noticed that you can include a spin down time as part of the
> disk idle command.. The disk idle command appears to be quite
> harmless as it just asks the drive to go to idle (if it was doing a
> read ahead or something else). So, I have this patch. I originally
> did this against 4.2-R I believe, but I think I have updated it to a
> more recent version.. (the revisions it's against are in the patch)..
>
> hope this helps you.
It does, in that it confirms that it's at least possible to spin down
disks without suspending the entire machine.
What I was thinking of, though, was a program or extension to atacontrol
that would send the standby or sleep signal and detach the device to
avoid having an unresponsive device entry.
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