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From: taob@gate.sinica.edu.tw (Brian Tao)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Strange Crash
Date: 28 Aug 1995 03:36:57 GMT
Organization: Institute of Biomedical Sciences, Academia Sinica
Lines: 24
Message-ID: <41rdkp$htt@gate.sinica.edu.tw>
References: <DDywqs.Jo9@ritz.mordor.com> <41q60m$p3u@reason.cdrom.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: @140.109.40.248
In article <41q60m$p3u@reason.cdrom.com>, Jordan K. Hubbard <jkh@FreeBSD.org> wrote:
>
>Yeah, I have.. I used to have a drive that would, very occasionally, just
>decide that it was having an attack of existential angst and needed to spin
>down for awhile.
Sounds like a wonky power supply or a thermal recal gone bezerk. ;-)
I noticed the same thing happening on the drives on both SGI's here,
but never got around to calling up tech support to find out what was
wrong. It turns out the models I have ship with "Patch 466"
installed, a crontab entry that spins down the drives on Thursdays and
Sundays at 2:45 am. This apparently makes older drives go through a
"cleaning cycle" which can reduce the chances of stiction ruining a
disk when you try to spin it back up after an extended power down.
The problem is, the clocks on the SGI's were perpetually off by
several hours because of a local network time daemon gone astray, so
the spin downs were occurring in the middle of the work day. Very
annoying when your simulation run pumps out data at a rate of
1.5MB/sec....
(I suppose this ought to go to comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.chat ;-) )
--
Brian ("Though this be madness, yet there is method in't") Tao
taob@gate.sinica.edu.tw <-- work ........ play --> taob@io.org