From owner-freebsd-stable Thu Aug 12 21:46: 6 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from guru.phone.net (guru.phone.net [209.157.82.120]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id B670814C3B for ; Thu, 12 Aug 1999 21:46:03 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mwm@phone.net) Received: (qmail 22643 invoked by uid 100); 13 Aug 1999 04:45:55 -0000 Received: from localhost (sendmail-bs@127.0.0.1) by localhost with SMTP; 13 Aug 1999 04:45:55 -0000 Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 21:45:55 -0700 (PDT) From: Mike Meyer To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: On freezes in 3.2-Stable In-Reply-To: <199908130437.AAA00518@bellsouth.net> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Fri, 13 Aug 1999, W Gerald Hicks wrote: :->When I kept up with the numbers for these things in a former :->life working for a disk manufacturer, I was always astounded :->at how much current the drives pulled during their power-on :->sequence. After startup, current begins to taper off rapidly. This stopped being relevant a long time ago, but... DEC MIPS-based workstations worked around this problem by having tweaked PROMs on their SCSI drives, with a SPIN-UP-ON-POWERON bit that defaulted to off. Ultrix would send the drives the SCSI command to spin them up - *after* everything else in the system was powered on. This meant they could use a cheaper power supply, as no supported configuration required it to deal with more than one drive spinning up at a time. Dealing with this was the *least* of the problems in trying to use DEC SCSI drives on other platforms. But they could be made to work.