Subject: Re: how to make harddisks sleep
To: None <bgrayson@marvin.ece.utexas.edu>
From: Ken Nakata <kenn@synap.ne.jp>
List: port-mac68k
Date: 11/01/1998 14:47:49
On Sat, 31 Oct 1998 21:32:12 -0600, Brian C. Grayson wrote:
> 
>   Slightly-related, on i386 machines, I've enabled BIOS drive
> spin-down before, and had the disk spin down under NetBSD.  It
> doesn't wake up every thirty seconds if the machine is completely
> idle.  So maybe sync doesn't do anything if there's nothing to
> do???

Ah, you're right.  I half-deliberately neglected to mention it...  But
having rethought of it, maybe it'll help if the machine is completely
idle.  Thanks for pointing it out.

But even so, I don't think there is a tool just to set your drive's
idle timer on mac68k (maybe there's one or two under MacOS, though).
You might have to write one up from scratch by yourself.  Fortunately,
there is a SCSI library in pkgsrc (libscsi) that can be used to issue
SCSI commands to a specific target.

But whether or not the NetBSD/mac68k SCSI drivers are patient enough
to wait for the sleeping drive to wake up is an entirely different
question.  I'm not too worried about it, though.

Ken