On Wed, 2006-13-09 at 12:32 +0200, Andreas Wolf wrote:
> Hi again,
> 
> I'm successfully running an ftp-service on my Quadra700 with NetBSD 
> 3.0.1 now. Fine so far, but since the machine shall be running 24/7 I 
> am a little concerned about the life-time expectation of my SCSI-HD. 
> The Quadra is ancient and so is the HD (although 2 or 3 years younger I 
> believe). Thus I am wondering if there is a package in general and for 
> the 68k port in particular that will manage a spin-down of the HD 
> during idle-times. The ftp-server will be accessed once a week or less 
> only. Most of the time the HD could go asleep. Could anyone give me a 
> hint on this?
> 
> Thanks, Andreas
> 

While I'm certainly no expert on this subject, I would probably have to
echo the sentiment expressed by Mr. Hauke Fath.   Starting and stopping
an old SCSI hard drive would probably cause more wear and tear on the
drive than just having it constantly spin.   Therefore, I would suggest
that you just let the drive run continuously if you're going to be
leaving the machine powered up 24/7.

If the integrity of the data is your primary concern, there is nothing
better to address that than a good regiment of routine backups.
Backing up the drive on a regular basis -- once a week or so -- would be
incredibly easy to implement with a cron job.

Use the force, Luke.   :-)