Best place to spin down disk after boot?

From: Stefan A. Deutscher (sa.deutscher_at_tiscali.de)
Date: 06/14/04

  • Next message: monica.bose_at_itc.alstom.com: "(no subject)" 
    Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2004 00:37:22 +0000
To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org

    Hi,

       I have a 5.1Release machine with currently four SCSI disks, out of
    which I need only two at any given time (system and /home). The other
    ones are an alternative system disk, and an OS/2 disk.

    They are set to spin up by themselves or via start unit from the SCSI
    controller, but I wish to spin down the unused ones. I understand that
    frequent spin up/down or power cyles may reduce disk lifetime, but these
    disks are never accessed, i.e. never mounted and never spun up again
    while the system is running.

    To reduce noise and heat production, I am going to spin down two SCSI
    disks on one of my machines with

      camcontrol stop -n da -u 0
      camcontrol stop -n da -u 2

    (Odd enough, a 'camcontrol stop da0 does _not_ work, it needs separate
    -n and -u specs.) To spin down the disks right after boot, I ponder
    sticking things either in the /etc/rc.local (seems to be going out of
    style though) or as a separate script in /etc/rc.d/. Any thoughts on
    that would be appreciated.

    As these commands take a while to return with a success message I'd like
    to do that in the background, and I wish to log it somewhere.

    Is there 'the right' way to send the camcontrol messages to syslog or
    the dmesg file (all true believers shall open their egg at the right
    end!)?

    Cheers, Stefan

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