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Date:      Sat, 8 Jul 2006 13:23:37 +0100
From:      Scott Mitchell <scott+lists.freebsd@fishballoon.org>
To:        freebsd-usb@freebsd.org
Subject:   Spinning down a USB drive?
Message-ID:  <20060708122337.GA1098@tuatara.fishballoon.org>

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Hi all,

I asked this on -questions already with no response - maybe the USB experts
over here will know the answer :-)  I'm looking for a way to spin down a
USB-connected drive, either manually or on a timeout.  I suspect I may be
SOL: it looks like umass doesn't have a mechanism for doing this, and the
best I've come up with is to temporarily connect the drive to a real ATA
cable to set its internal spindown timeout (and remember to do this again
every time the drive is power-cycled).

Assuming there's no good way to do this, can anyone recommend an external
USB2 drive enclosure (with or without a drive) that will do automatic
spindown of an idle drive.  And that plays nicely with FreeBSD of course!

Many thanks in advance,

	Scott


----- Forwarded message from Scott Mitchell -----

Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2006 22:42:40 +0100
From: Scott Mitchell <scott+lists.freebsd@fishballoon.org>
Subject: Spinning down a USB drive?
To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org

Hi all,

Does anyone know of any way to ask a USB-attached drive to spin down (or
better yet some way to have it happen automatically after an idle timeout)?
I've tried "camcontrol stop" but it doesn't like that:

(511) llama:~ $ sudo camcontrol stop 1:0:0 -v
Error received from stop unit command
(pass0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): STOP START UNIT. CDB: 1b 0 0 0 0 0
(pass0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): CAM Status: SCSI Status Error
(pass0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): SCSI Status: Check Condition
(pass0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): ILLEGAL REQUEST asc:24,0
(pass0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): Invalid field in CDB

The drive is just a regular Seagate PATA drive in an external enclosure
that can be connected over FireWire or USB.  I've had it running over FW
for a couple of years quite happily; "camcontrol stop" would make it spin
down and "camcontrol start" spin it back up again when connected this way.
Unfortunately the FW interface on either the drive or the machine has died
so I've had to switch over to USB.  The drive is only used for a couple of
hours daily for backups - I'd like to keep it spun down the rest of the
time simply because it gets pretty hot even when idle, and to save a bit of
power.

The USB-ATA adapter shows up like this:

(515) llama:~ $ usbdevs -v
Controller /dev/usb0:
addr 1: full speed, self powered, config 1, UHCI root hub(0x0000), VIA(0x0000), rev 1.00
 port 1 addr 2: full speed, self powered, config 1, USB TO IDE(0x0702), Genesys Logic(0x05e3), rev 0.02
[...]

It's using USB 1.1 right now because the machine is running 5.4 where USB
2.0 wasn't enabled by default in GENERIC (and I didn't think I needed it).

I can post dmesg and other info as necessary.

Many thanks in advance,

	Scott

-- 
===========================================================================
Scott Mitchell           | PGP Key ID | "Eagles may soar, but weasels
Cambridge, England       | 0x54B171B9 |  don't get sucked into jet engines"
scott at fishballoon.org | 0xAA775B8B |      -- Anon
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----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
===========================================================================
Scott Mitchell           | PGP Key ID | "Eagles may soar, but weasels
Cambridge, England       | 0x54B171B9 |  don't get sucked into jet engines"
scott at fishballoon.org | 0xAA775B8B |      -- Anon



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