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Date:      Mon, 16 Nov 1998 13:46:36 -0600
From:      "Gary E. Bickford" <garyb@sugar-land.oilfield.slb.com>
To:        "Justin T. Gibbs" <gibbs@narnia.plutotech.com>, "Robert G. Brown" <rgb@phy.duke.edu>
Cc:        aic7xxx@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Drive constantly grinding ...
Message-ID:  <v04011702b276312ffdaf@[163.185.167.195]>
In-Reply-To: <199811151946.MAA13725@narnia.plutotech.com>
References:  <Pine.LNX.3.96.981115143316.5548A-100000@ganesh.phy.duke.edu>

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At 1:46 PM -0600 11/15/98, Justin T. Gibbs wrote:
>What you are hearing is likely what Seagate calls 'dithering'.
>When the drive is otherwise idle, the head is moved to new locations
>periodically so that it doesn't pass over the same piece of media
>for extended periods of time.  The Seagate representative told us
>(Pluto) that this was done to ensure that if a plater contained an
>imperfection that caused the head to 'brush' the platter occassionally
>(not a head crash) the head would not wear out the platter.  For
>real time applications (Pluto offers real time video editor/server
>products) where you want the head to stay where you put it, this
>is somewhat annoying.  Pluto's work around is to send a Test Unit
>Ready command to the drive every 500ms or so which restarts the
>'diterhing timer' and prevents the extra seeks.

Cheetahs have a number of different usage profiles that you can set, ie for
general systems use, video streaming, etc.  I wonder if just setting the
profile to the video streaming mode would fix that.  I've never done it,
just read about it.
Gary E. Bickford, garyb@slb.com
Sr. Systems Administrator, Connect Schlumberger http://www.connect.slb.com

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