Re: howto spin down a SCSI HD?

Andreas Bombe (andreas.bombe@munich.netsurf.de)
Thu, 6 Jan 2000 00:10:59 +0100

On Wed, Jan 05, 2000 at 10:28:43AM -0500, Richard B. Johnson wrote:
> On Wed, 5 Jan 2000 assie@pop.casema.net wrote:
>
> > I'm getting crazy by the sound of my 3 1Gb SCSI hd's
> > how can i spin them down so they make less noise?
> > I heard about scsi-idle but there are only old versions 2.0.36 ,2.1.62
> > Is it already included in the newer kernels? (i'm running 2.3.35)
> >
> > I wish you all a noiseless new year
> >
>
> The START/STOP unit command (0x1b) will, with some devices, shut down
> the drive motor. However, this command is optional and not implemented
> on all drives.

And it is probably not best practice to spin down SCSI disks often.
Unlike IDE disks, SCSI disks are targetted at the server market where
disks are ideally running 24 hours a day.

The average amount of spin downs before disk failure is therefore
usually a lot smaller than for IDE disks, so it's possible to lose the
disk after a year of idle spin downs (say, 10 times a day?).

This might have changed with current disks where IDE and SCSI versions
are identical except for the electronics (as heard in another thread
here on linux-kernel).

-- 
          Andreas E. Bombe <andreas.bombe@munich.netsurf.de>
http://home.pages.de/~andreas.bombe/                DSA key 0x04880A44


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