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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!uunet!uunet!199.60.229.3!newsfeed.direct.ca!su-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!newsfeed.nacamar.de!fu-berlin.de!irz401!orion.sax.de!uriah.heep!news From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: HD sleep Date: 7 Jun 1997 14:29:33 GMT Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden Lines: 36 Message-ID: <5nbr8d$2h6@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <slrn5ph92h.n6i.vibes@pc193.janco.sn.no> Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.heep.sax.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.6 X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:42568 vibes@hipdrome.org (Jørn-Morten Innselset) wrote: > So - is there any way to > make FreeBSD honour the power saving settings in my BIOS, or - > better still - put my harddisks to sleep by itself? There are no precautions for a FreeBSD-initiated disk spindown by now. Most of today's IDE drives provide the ability to spin down after some period of inactivity. You gonna tell it to them by a certain IDE command. Since FreeBSD doesn't change the IDE setup, if your BIOS properly tells this command to the drive at powerup, the drive will honor it (and FreeBSD doesn't care much, except of that you could sometimes see a spurious `interrupt timeout' message at spinup). If this doesn't work for you, your drive probably doesn't implement this command. I once wrote an extension to the wdc(4) driver to support the sleep command for IDE drives in systems where the BIOS doesn't offer this as a setup feature (i needed it for a customer). Well, the funny thing is that the ATA-pseudostandard is very wishy-washy in this respect, so while i'm able to cause a number of drives to spin down after a period of inactivity, the actual amount of time when this will happen is determined by the phase of the moon, or who knows. I've threatened to commit this hack to the source repository some day, but didn't do it so far (mainly since my ``gut feeling'' tells me i should first see whether there's any outstanding command active on the drive, which i don't do yet). -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)