Spin down hard disk: any suggestions?

[Eric Anderson]

Paolo Pisati wrote:
> As the subject says i'm trying to spin down/turn off/
> put in energy safe/etcetc automatically
> my usb disk.
> 
> I'm running 5.x and the only way to reliably calm down 
> my disk was to umount it.
> 
> The 'trick' was to use automount and periodically 
> check & umount it, but i thought there should be better 
> ways to handle it (or at least i hope so :). 
> (from: "Fun With Automounting on FreeBSD" -
> http://www.daemonnews.org/200202/automounting.html)
> 
> Any other ideas/suggestions?
> How do you do it?
> Any help from the recent ATA/SCSI/CAM/etcetc driver? 
> 
> It's quite annoying when your brand new USB disk starts getting
> hotter and hotter cause the bloody usb case is too little and 
> there's no air circulation/fan at all... 

I know ataidle works well for ATA disks, but not sure about scsi-types 
like USB (I would bet it won't work out-of-the-box, but you might be 
able to modify it?).

Eric



-- 
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Eric Anderson        Sr. Systems Administrator        Centaur Technology
A lost ounce of gold may be found, a lost moment of time never.
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