ATA powermanagement and ATA spindown.. request (?)

[Paul Mather]

On Wed, 11 Aug 2004 19:13:08 +0000, heikki soerum
<heikkis at student.matnat.uio.no> wrote:

> 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?

Have you tried sysutils/ataidle from ports?  Here is the pkg-descr:

>>>>>
ATAidle is a utility to set the power management features
of ata hard drives.  This includes idle and standby timeouts,
APM and acoustic level settings, and it can show details about
the installed devices.

Author: Bruce Cran <bruce at cran.org.uk>
WWW:    http://www.cran.org.uk/bruce/software.php
<<<<<

Cheers,

Paul.
-- 
e-mail: paul at gromit.dlib.vt.edu

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