Automatic means for spinning down disks available?

[Pieter de Goeje]

On Wednesday 11 April 2007, Steve Franks wrote:
> Say, I've been meaning to install ataidle for awhile, as my server handles
> approximately 3-5 requests for cvs per 24 hours, and I'm a pragmatic
> believer in the dangers of global warming, and I've never had a disk go bad
> on my old w2k systems, even though they spun up/down at least 20-50 times a
> day (on my desktop).
>
> It's non-obivous, however, from the docs/man wether ataide makes persistent
> changes, or if you need to run it from cron, rc, etc.  Anyone know the
> 'proper' usage for ataidle?
>
> I found this: http://andreas.syndrom23.de/drupal/files/ataidle which might
> be of general interest to folks along these same lines.  No idea if it's
> correct usage, however.
>
> Thanks,
> Steve
You only need to run it once at startup to set the various acoustic and idle 
time settings. 
If you know you won't be needing your disks after a specific time a cronjob 
(spinning down the disks immidiately) might be a good method too.

Regards,
Pieter