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Old 29th April 2009
drhowarddrfine drhowarddrfine is offline
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Default How to turn drives off after a period of time?

I can't seem to find this. I have an app that checks a web page every minute, saves a copy when it changes and faxes it somewhere. Sometimes it goes a whole day without doing anything so it's a waste to have the hard drives spinning. How can I turn the drives off after so many minutes of inactivity and have them spin up when my script tries to save to it?
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Old 29th April 2009
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jggimi jggimi is offline
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AFAIK, ATA disk spin-down is a function of APM. According to apm(4), this feature was not implemented in FreeBSD 7.

(I only know about it because of OpenBSD's atactl(8), which has an apmset command. Equivalent functionality is not available from FreeBSD's atacontrol(8) utility.)
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Old 30th April 2009
Beastie Beastie is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jggimi View Post
Equivalent functionality is not available from FreeBSD's atacontrol(8) utility.)
Isn't that what you want: atacontrol(8)?
Quote:
spindown
Set or report timeout after which the device will be spun down. To arm the timeout the device needs at least one more request after setting the timeout. To disable spindown, set the timeout to zero. No further actions are needed in this case.

[...]

To spin down a disk after 30 minutes run
atacontrol spindown ad6 1800
dd if=/dev/ad6 of=/dev/null count=1

[...]

You can check the current setting with
atacontrol spindown ad6
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Last edited by Beastie; 30th April 2009 at 07:01 AM.
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Old 30th April 2009
richardpl richardpl is offline
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There is also ataidle available in ports tree.
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Old 30th April 2009
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Beastie View Post
Isn't that what you want...
My mistake, I was looking for "apm" not "spin". Thanks for the correction.
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Old 30th April 2009
drhowarddrfine drhowarddrfine is offline
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Under atacontrol:
Quote:
To spin down a disk after 30 minutes run

atacontrol spindown ad6 1800
dd if=/dev/ad6 of=/dev/null count=1
That looks like what I want to do.
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Old 1st May 2009
drhowarddrfine drhowarddrfine is offline
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As mentioned above, that functionality isn't available in FreeBSD so looks like ataidle will have to do. Thanks, Richard.
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Old 1st May 2009
richardpl richardpl is offline
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atacontrol spindown is same as ataidle -I (I guess)

-P flag from atailde controls APM, which is not really usefull in your case.

In other words ataidle just have few fetures more than atacontrol.

In your case running "ataidle -o" should conserve maximal energy (just make sure it got called only few times per day)
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Old 2nd May 2009
Beastie Beastie is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by drhowarddrfine View Post
As mentioned above, that functionality isn't available in FreeBSD
What do you mean? If you give it "atacontrol spindown", does it display "usage: ..." again, or what?
What FreeBSD version are you using? Because it seems to work under 7.1.

Also from the release notes:
The atacontrol(8) utility now supports a spindown command to set or report timeout after which the device will be spun down.
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Old 3rd May 2009
drhowarddrfine drhowarddrfine is offline
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Then I'm wrong because I forgot to say this box is under fbsd6. That's good news cause I prefer doing it that way but I don't have the right version right now.
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