Summary: Re: Spin down HDD after disk sync or before power off

[Oliver Fromme]

Alexander Best wrote:
 > i just stumbled upon PR 144770, where a somebody seems to have mistaken the
 > spindown value for minutes instead of seconds. so i really think we should have
 > this warning in atacontrol!
 > 
 > +1 from brucec, if i understood him correctly.
 > 
 > another possibility would be of course changing the spindown value from seconds
 > to minutes. imo this seems very reasonable, because measuring spindown time in
 > seconds is too fine grained and not intuitive. just like specifying the
 > 'shutdown -p XX' delay in microseconds would not be useful. ;)

No, please don't.  Changing the meaning of the value from
seconds to minutes will break people's existing setups.

I'm also against printing a warning for values less than 600.
If I want to set the value to 300, I don't want to be slapped
with a useless warning.

Also note that 300 (and even much less) might be perfectly
reasonable, depending on the kind of device!  As a rule of
thumb, the smaller a drive, the better it is optimized for
many spin up/down cycles.  For example, I've got a portable
HDD mp3 player that contains a 1.8" disk.  When playing an
mp3 file, it spins up every 20 seconds or so, reads 500 KB,
then spins down again.

In my opinion, this is purely a documentation issue.
If it is well-documented that the spindown value is given
in seconds, then that should be sufficient.

Supporting values like "5m" or "1h" would be fine, as long
as a value without a letter still means seconds.

Best regards
   Oliver

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