»

[Dragster]

Hello folks,

just wondering if any of you know of a proggy on amiga that let's you turn off the motor of a SCSI harddrive after being idle for some time (e.g. 5 mins or so). There are some on aminet I've found but they only seem to support IDE hard drives (via scsi.device). I need something that works with a SCSI HDs attached to a blizzardppc scsi controller.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!



Dragster

[Floid]

I'm really sleep deprived, but I think this might be a tough problem. While I could be insane, I think IDE drives implement "APM" support (from the not-so-old Wintel spec), which basically means one command to set the mode, and then the drive will buffer/call a wait on new incoming commands and automatically spin up...

...meanwhile, SCSI has had the ability since roughly day one, in the form of the 'Stop Unit' and 'Start Unit' commands - but they require the *explicit* issue of a Start Unit to wake the drive back up. Whether this is hard to do in AmigaOS, or it's simply that nobody's bothered (maybe someone's aware of a util?), I'm not qualified to say.

Spinning drives up/down can be a mixed blessing. Constant rotation can be 'healthier' than spinning up/spinning down - most wear and tear gets its chance to occur then - on the other hand, you do run the risk of spinning all lubrication off the platters, and/or, say, losing the windings in your spindle motor to thermal stresses when you finally *do* shut the drive down/try to spin it back up.

[zipper]

I think I used Sleeper (sleeper20.lha?) with my Oktagon years ago.

[pVC]

I use Noisesaver with SCSI HDs. Can be found from Aminet. Sleeper works with SCSI too... At least both work with 1230scsi.device.

[Dragster]

Thanks FLoid, Zipper, PVC for the suggestions and ideas. I'll try the options tonite

Regards

Dragster

[lionstorm]

On IDE HD, I often got read/write errors when using this on/off feature so I decided to drop it to secure my WB.
Use dpms related utils to save your monitor.
Lio