On Mon, 15 Jul 2002, Brian A. Seklecki wrote:

> On Mon, 15 Jul 2002 @ 11:54am (+0900), henry nelson wrote:
>
> hn> Thanks for all of the help everyone has given me.  As a result, I have
> hn> 20020317-1.5.3_ALPHA running on a SparcStation 5, with two identical
> hn> Seagate 2GB SCA drives, and most importantly, an sbus 10base2 nic in
> hn> addition to the onboard le0.
> hn>
> hn> BIG PROBLEM.  The disks are going to burn up if I can't figure out a way
> hn> to spin them down and keep them that way except for brief actual use periods.
> hn> I used it once for about an hour, and you could poach eggs on those hdds!
>
> ...mmm, maybe umount(8) the filesystems on the disk, then use scsictl(8)
> to 'detatch' the ID/LUN from the bus/chain.  This will minimize activity
> on the disks. As for sending a signal to spin down...does one even exist?
>
> ...afaik, spinning down disks is part of the apm 1.1 spec that exists in
> i386 hardware...no support exists for sparc.
>
> anyone else?

I haven't been able to find anything on how to do it (and I can't just turn
of the disk because there's only one). My problem isn't heat (my SS5 ran
for over a year perfectly solid), but noise. The single SCA disk in there
is louder than the whole of my Athlon (which has 3 or 4 large fans, two
hard drives, etc). I finally turned it off because, even stuck in my
closet, the racket was driving me nuts.

I don't believe SCSI (or at least what's in the SS5) knows how to spin down
the disk. Anyone know of an SBUS IDE card? That would work. <shudder>

So if anyone finds a way to do this, please mention it on port-sparc. :)

-Jack