ATA harddrive sleep/spindown timout?

[heikki soerum]

I'm running FreeBSD 4.8-stable 
on an  Mini ITX Epia system.
(onboard C3 800 mhz, Video, sound, NIC, TV-out, 2 ATA IDE controllers.)

Is it possible to put ata harddrives in spindown/sleep/suspend mode
without putting the whole system to sleep/suspend?
I'm building an fileserver with several disks that won't be used more
than a couple of hours each day, and in the mean time I would like to
reduce the noise level by putting the ATA harddrives in sleep/suspend
mode with an timeout.

This is an *critical* abillity, I like FreeBSD a lot, but without this
functionality I'l have to run linux and use hdparm to reduce the noise
to an acceptable level.

Heikki Soerum.


-- 
- "In My Not so Humble Opinion"