From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Mar 3 16:03:31 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id QAA07766 for hackers-outgoing; Mon, 3 Mar 1997 16:03:31 -0800 (PST) Received: from genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au (genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au [129.127.96.120]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id QAA07751 for ; Mon, 3 Mar 1997 16:03:24 -0800 (PST) Received: (from msmith@localhost) by genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au (8.8.5/8.7.3) id KAA08579; Tue, 4 Mar 1997 10:31:58 +1030 (CST) From: Michael Smith Message-Id: <199703040001.KAA08579@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> Subject: Re: scsi spindown In-Reply-To: from J Wunsch at "Mar 3, 97 11:17:41 am" To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de Date: Tue, 4 Mar 1997 10:31:57 +1030 (CST) Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL28 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk J Wunsch stands accused of saying: > As Michael Smith wrote: > > > > Has anyone modified FreeBSD-anything to spindown scsi (direct) drives > > > after some period of non-use? > > > A lot of disks will refuse to spin down. > > So you won't get this feature for these old suckers, what's the deal? You will get lots of nasty error messages instead. > > Better to configure your disks > > to spin themselves down using scsi(8) if they support it. > > Where should this be supported? IDE drives do sometimes support this > (though the standard is very very funky for this), but SCSI? I've > never stumpled across a mode page setting that allows for an auto > spindown. Probably as vendor-dependant as for IDE disks. You could also use a cron job that read a sysctl variable to get the last time that a disk was accessed and then spin it down using scsi(8). > The `od' driver supports spindown while the device is being unused. > Supporting spindown while the device is open will requires some > restructuring of the code. I don't know about the internals of the SCSI system wrt. sending the spindown command, but I know the SCSI code is reasonably tolerant of "please wait" messages from drives (from having powered them down and up again while the system is on...). > cheers, J"org -- ]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer msmith@gsoft.com.au [[ ]] Genesis Software genesis@gsoft.com.au [[ ]] High-speed data acquisition and (GSM mobile) 0411-222-496 [[ ]] realtime instrument control. (ph) +61-8-8267-3493 [[ ]] Unix hardware collector. "Where are your PEZ?" The Tick [[