ATA harddrive sleep/spindown timout?

[Graham North]

Hello Heikki:

I stumbled on this post by you - but not resolving answers - I have the
same question?

Did you find good answers for FreeBSD? If so, would you be willing to
share your experience?
Thank you for any help you can offer.
Graham North
[email]graham.north@telus.net[/email]


Your post last year:************

I'm running FreeBSD 4.8-stable
on an Mini ITX Epia system.
(onboard C3 800 mhz, Video, sound, NIC, TV-out, 2 ATA IDE controllers.)

Is it possible to put ata harddrives in spindown/sleep/suspend mode
without putting the whole system to sleep/suspend?
I'm building an fileserver with several disks that won't be used more
than a couple of hours each day, and in the mean time I would like to
reduce the noise level by putting the ATA harddrives in sleep/suspend
mode with an timeout.

This is an *critical* abillity, I like FreeBSD a lot, but without this
functionality I'l have to run linux and use hdparm to reduce the noise
to an acceptable level.

Heikki Soerum.



No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 266.4.0 - Release Date: 2/22/2005

[cpghost@cordula.ws]

On Wed, Feb 23, 2005 at 10:36:29PM -0800, Graham North wrote:

> I stumbled on this post by you - but not resolving answers - I have the
> same question?
>

>> Is it possible to put ata harddrives in spindown/sleep/suspend mode
>> without putting the whole system to sleep/suspend?

I don't know the right answer to this, but the following work-around
may help:

# atacontrol detach <channelnumber>
has the nice side effect of spinning down the detached drives.

WARNING: Don't detach drives (channels) with mounted file systems.
Umount first, then detach! Use at your own risk!

Cheers,
-cpghost.

--
Cordula's Web. [url]http://www.cordula.ws/[/url]

[Svein Halvor Halvorsen]

* Graham North [2005-02-23 22:36 -0800]

> Is it possible to put ata harddrives in spindown/sleep/suspend mode
> without putting the whole system to sleep/suspend?

Take a look at ataidle in the ports collection.

Note that the disk will come back to life again when you access it, and
that several processes do exactly this all the time. In order for ataidle
to be very useful, you'd have to twaek the system's crontabs et.al.

[Graham North]

Hello Svein:

Thank you for this suggestion. I will follow-up.
Graham/


Svein Halvor Halvorsen wrote:

>* Graham North [2005-02-23 22:36 -0800]
>
>

>> Is it possible to put ata harddrives in spindown/sleep/suspend mode
>> without putting the whole system to sleep/suspend?
>>
>>

>
>Take a look at ataidle in the ports collection.
>
>Note that the disk will come back to life again when you access it, and
>that several processes do exactly this all the time. In order for ataidle
>to be very useful, you'd have to twaek the system's crontabs et.al.
>
>
>
>

No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 266.4.0 - Release Date: 2/22/2005