Stop using a SATA drive

[Charles Swiger]

On Aug 25, 2015, at 9:51 AM, Polytropon <freebsd at edvax.de> wrote:
> On Tue, 25 Aug 2015 09:35:16 -0700, Adrian Chadd wrote:
>> You can likely send commands to USB disks for "plz sync and power down thx".
> 
> But it will be something the _device_ has to implement, I'd say.

Sure.  Every external USB hard drive needs to implement flush cache, idle, standby,
and sleep or else they'd lose data whenever folks had their machines go to sleep.

>> You can almost always turn off and on USB ports on your computer.
> 
> Including power? The mainboards that I owned usually did not
> have settings for disabling USB ports and their power...
> In most cases, power was available even when the board
> had power, but the machine didn't run yet.

Try a newer motherboard based off of the H97 / Z97 chipsets, or
at least the prior H75/H77/Z75/Z77 generations.

UEFI BIOS gives a whole lot more options for USB and SATA power
management, including explicitly enabling or disabling power to
individual ports either in UEFI at system boot or while running.

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck