Best kind of hard drive for heavy use?

[Olivier Nicole]

Hi,

I have been reading the thread and have some concerns. My backup
machine uses some recent, consumer grade, disks (it's better than
tapes anyway).

How can I detect if a disk is effectively stopped or not?

I have found the command
catcontrol cmd ada0 -a "E5 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00" -r -
but how to know it is reporting the state of the drive and not the
state the driver assumes the drive to be?

TIA,

Olivier