>> if i "atactl wd0 setidle 0" the disk runs constantly and the 
>> errors do not occur.
>> 
>> i was hoping Manuel might have some ideas about this?
>
>This is because there's no wau for the driver to know whenever the drive is
>off or not, it has to try a command and wait for it to fail to reset the drive,
>which will make it power up.

My reading of the ATA spec says that the IDLE state shouldn't require a
reset to exit it; the drive should spin up for you.  It's been my
experience that IDLE is buggy on some drives; I personally use "atactl
setstandby".  Does anyone care if I change the documentation and examples?
(I think part of that is my fault; I did those example scripts from memory
on the web page and I used "setidle" instead of "setstandby").

--Ken