From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Apr 19 15:36: 7 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from revolution.3-cities.com (revolution.3-cities.com [204.203.224.155]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9E5BC155D3 for ; Mon, 19 Apr 1999 15:32:52 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from kstewart@3-cities.com) Received: from 3-cities.com (kenn1209.bossig.com [208.26.241.209]) by revolution.3-cities.com (8.8.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id PAA15893; Mon, 19 Apr 1999 15:29:41 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <371BACD4.6CEC913A@3-cities.com> Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1999 15:23:16 -0700 From: Kent Stewart Organization: Columbia Basin Virtual Community Project X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.51 [en] (WinNT; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Patrick Seal Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Hard drive spindown References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Patrick Seal wrote: > > On a recent slashdot discussion on the new ORB drives: > http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/04/19/2021246 > - > I got the EIDE version a little over a month ago. It installs into a linux > machine flawlessly. The only problem that I had was couple weeks after I got the > drive I heard a grinding noise. Turned out that linux never spun the drive > down even once in that first 2 weeks and I never used it, so it ended up > grinding off the cylinders off the far edge of the platter. I promptly > exchanged it and set a spindown with hdparm and its been working > beautifully ever since. > > I would definatly recommend this drive, just make sure that > you either use the drive a lot or get it to spin down. Seems like the > drive should move the head around all by itself to avoid damage like what > happened to me though. I have EIDE drives that have never been turned off in 2 or 3 years except for lightening storms and hardware installs. Western Digital drives, for example, are programmed to move every so many seconds of idle time to prevent wear down. There is a whole new set of technology that keep the modern drives from wearing out like yours did. Kent To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message