In message <200001180531.AAA10355@ginger.cmf.nrl.navy.mil>, Ken Hornstein write
>Really?  What does it do/not do?  BTW .... try taking out the setidle,
>I only use standby (I get the sense most drives ignore the idle timer,
>but I could see it causing weird effects).

What seems to happen is that, after 5-10 minutes, the drive will spin down,
and then about 5-10 seconds later, it'll spin up.

>BTW, I think that in the interest of power conservation, 600 seconds
>is way too long.  I have mine set to 10.  There were some interesting
>Usenix papers on this subject (see the references on the NetBSD
>help pages about power management).  One paper documented that the
>break-even point for disk spinup is about 6 seconds (if the disk
>sleeps longer than 6 seconds, you're saving power).  Both papers
>agreed that default spindown times were much too long.  But don't
>believe me; read the papers and decide for yourself.

Wow.  I'm actually not as concerned about power saving as I am about disk
lifetime, for which I've been told spindown is almost always a loss.

-s