I'm rather keen to get IDE drive idling working, so want to know
(obviously) if this has been done before or is work in progress. If
not, I'm willing to put in some time (I've already located the
standards, hard drive-wise). If this is required, is there any
in-place (system interface) standard I should conform to, or is it new
ground. And, if it is new ground, how should it be handled?

The obvious approach is ioctl's on devices to modify the standard
in-drive timer register settings, with a daemon or cron job (cron
job=definate disk hit!?) to reduce idle times at low priority
times. I'm thinking mostly about being able to run my system 24 hours
a day without the noise/power drain during (in particular) night.

A more automated system watching for activity levels would be nicer in
user space than integral to the kernel, but how feasable is that? (and
I hate the idea of starting up the drive just to run a cron job to
shut the drive down faster).

Anyway, comments?

Dave.