Tim: >> not applicable to a drive as part of a computer system. Manufacturers >> may well preset a drive to go to sleep / be protective, fairly soon, >> expecting computer OSs to configure the drive to best fit into the OS's >> usual manner of using drives. Some computer OSs (or, more to the point, >> their configurations), do actually set the drive differently than the >> defaults. Alan Cox: > No. The ATA philosophy is pretty much "don't break DOS". DOS and Windows > 95/98 don't know this stuff so you can't assume the OS will touch it. I don't think that rapidly head parking drives would upset them, those OSs don't keep poking at files on the drive all the time, like Linux does. Well, not in my experience. >> deliberately using it) at boot time, or have a SMART daemon >> configuration that throws up a warning about there being a very large >> number of head parks within a short time period, the same as you get >> warnings about read errors, etc., prompting users to reconfigure the >> settings themselves, as best suited their own needs. > Not a bad idea at all - file bug/send patches. I'm not familiar enough with it to do that, but I thought I'd see (on here) whether the idea had any merit. I've had a bit of a look at the smartd.conf man file, and I think I can see the direction of how to go about it, but I'll need to think about it a bit more. -- (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.
