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Date:      Tue, 29 Jun 2004 13:04:30 +0400
From:      Igor Pokrovsky <ip@doom.homeunix.org>
To:        Markie <mark.cullen@dsl.pipex.com>
Cc:        Arne Schwabe <arne@rfc2549.org>
Subject:   Re: Setting Standby Mode for ATA Disks
Message-ID:  <20040629090430.GA44729@doom.homeunix.org>
In-Reply-To: <002c01c45adb$53ce6770$f700000a@ape>
References:  <86d63n8ttx.fsf@kamino.rfc1149.org> <002c01c45adb$53ce6770$f700000a@ape>

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On Fri, Jun 25, 2004 at 06:38:51PM +0100, Markie wrote:
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Arne Schwabe" <arne@rfc2549.org>
> To: <hackers@FreeBSD.org>
> Sent: Friday, June 25, 2004 5:51 PM
> Subject: Setting Standby Mode for ATA Disks
> 
> 
> | Hi,
> |
> | is there a way to set the standby mode for ATA Disks
> |
> | Under linux hdparm -S seems to work:
> |
> |        -S     Set the standby (spindown) timeout for the drive.  This
> value is
> |               used by the drive to determine how long to wait  (with  no
> disk
> |               activity)  before  turning  off the spindle motor to save
> power.
> |               Under such circumstances, the drive may take as long as 30
> sec-
> |               onds  to respond to a subsequent disk access, though most
> drives
> |               are much quicker.  The encoding of the timeout value is
> somewhat
> |               peculiar.   A  value  of zero means "off".  Values from 1
> to 240
> |               specify multiples of 5 seconds, for timeouts from 5
> seconds  to
> |               20  minutes.   Values from 241 to 251 specify from 1 to 11
> units
> |               of 30 minutes, for timeouts from 30 minutes  to  5.5
> hours.   A
> |               value  of 252 signifies a timeout of 21 minutes, 253 sets a
> ven-
> |               dor-defined timeout, and 255 is interpreted as 21  minutes
> plus
> |               15 seconds.
> |
> | I googled but I did not found anything like this for FreeBSD :/
> 
> Well this almost certainly doesn't help your question at all, but when I
> upgraded a box from 4.x to 5.2.1 recently I found it was spinning down one
> of the disks without twiddling with any settings at all. This, in turn,
> appears to have caused the box to lockup/panic (can't remember now) so I
> had to make a cron job that wrote to the disk every minute to stop it from
> spinning down!
> 
> I would love to know if there's some tool which can be used to just turn
> this behaviour off completely!

Did you try to turn it off in BIOS?

-ip

-- 
In a family recipe you just discovered in an old book,
the most vital measurement will be illegible.



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