Alan Cox: >>> If you want to change your drive behaviour from the vendor supplied >>> defaults see "man hdparm" Tim: >> I have. But what you have is an abstract range of numbers which apply >> some sort of power management, but without any definition of what >> those numbers mean, other than more or less power management. You >> don't get something like - if the drive has been idle for five >> minutes, or X seconds, you can get the drive to park the head. Guy Fraser: > Isn't that the Manufacturers responsibility to provide those details? I don't know. I don't know if they all go about it in different ways (I wouldn't be surprised), or if there's a consistency that the tool can make use of to give the user an easy to understand way to use it. e.g. Look at hdparm -S as described in the hdparm man file: -S Set the standby (spindown) timeout for the drive. This value is used by the drive to determine how long to wait (with no disk activity) before turning off the spindle motor to save power. Under such circumstances, the drive may take as long as 30 seconds to respond to a subsequent disk access, though most drives are much quicker. The encoding of the timeout value is somewhat peculiar. A value of zero means "timeouts are disabled": the device will not automatically enter standby mode. Values from 1 to 240 specify multiples of 5 seconds, yielding timeouts from 5 seconds to 20 minutes. Values from 241 to 251 specify from 1 to 11 units of 30 minutes, yield- ing timeouts from 30 minutes to 5.5 hours. A value of 252 sig- nifies a timeout of 21 minutes. A value of 253 sets a vendor- defined timeout period between 8 and 12 hours, and the value 254 is reserved. 255 is interpreted as 21 minutes plus 15 seconds. Note that some older drives may have very different interpreta- tions of these values. That option supposedly has some values that you can expect to do something in particular. NB: Spindown is a different issue that what we've been discussing (head parking), I'm just picking on it as an example of an option with some defined parameters. -- (This computer runs FC7, my others run FC4, FC5 & FC6, in case that's important to the thread.) Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
