ATA powermanagement and ATA spindown.. request (?)

[heikki soerum]

For countless years Linux, windows and several other OS for the Peasants
has had powermanagement on their ATA drives... And countless times has
my harddrives on my fileserver suffered the Click of Death Syndrome
bacause of overheating.. Until an kind soul made an patch to
atacontrol and the 5.2.1-Release kernel that at least allowed me to
manually issue an spindown command to my harddrives...
And lo and behold!, It was even usable on mounted harddrives! Alas,
setting an cronjob to issue spindown commands isn't that wise, since any
writing or reading being done when the drives are accessed will freeze
for 10-20 seconds while the drive spins down and then up again..
And manually login in as Root to issue the atacontrol sleep command gets
to be an hasle after an while.

Now the 5.2-current is working it's way towards 5.3 (hopefully stable)
I'm getting nervous that the patch hasn't been submitted.. Or wheter
someone would be kind enough to code an timer that spins an drive down N
seconds/minutes after the last access to the drive.

First off all, does anyone else have any demand for such an feature?
I can't post the patch until it's creator has given his permission.
Maybe someone else would like to se such an feature inncluded into
freebsd?
Or are there someone out there willing to write such an feature?

Heikki Soerum.


-- 
"Throughout history it has been the inaction of those who could
have acted,  the indifference  of those  who should  have known
better,  the silence of the  voice of justice  when it mattered
most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph."
                                               - Haile Selassie