On Wed, 2 Aug 2000, Manuel Bouyer wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 02, 2000 at 08:22:27AM -0700, Eduardo Horvath wrote:
> > Then maybe the disk driver should keep track of how long the disk has been
> > idle and always send the start/stop unit command if it's been idle more
> > than a specific amount of time.
> 
> The driver can't really know how long the disk has been idle because the
> power management is done *inside the disk*.
> And there's no start/stop command for IDE disks.

The driver knows when the last command it sent to the disk completed.  It
can key off that.  Use a default value of, say 30s idle time that can be
overrideen with some option.

Eduardo Horvath