Re: Automatic means for spinning down disks available?

Jonathan Horne wrote:
On Sunday 08 April 2007 18:11:51 Garrett Cooper wrote:
Gary Kline wrote:
On Sun, Apr 08, 2007 at 10:10:17PM +0400, Yuri Grebenkin wrote:
Just wonder if it's better for an HDD not to spindown at all.
Maybe it's safer to spin in peace than to park/launch?
What do you think?
My guess (really a SWAG) is that it's bettter to leave things
just happily spinning, 24*7. In Nov, '99 a power off//on
destryed my new (105-day-old) 9G SCSI drive. Off ffor fewer
than five seconds, then a spike or two, and the drive went
deadder than a decade-old corpse. Lost 10 months of files.
((Well, my tape backup had flubbed up.))

Who would know??? I've heard both sides, and so far, just
leaving drive spin seems slightly better.

{Futureistic[?] idea: maybe a new drive can have a mode of
Full-Operation and (slower) Spin. It wouldn't take more than
a second to transition from the slow-spin to full-op mode.
Open files, OS states, and whatever could be stored to RAM... .

Any little old winemakers, er, diskmakers out there?
}
Good point. The worst stress points during a disks life are at spin-up
from what I've read.

Also, about the disk spinning at different speeds: many contemporary
disks have "acoustics" levels where you can adjust the speed on demand
(assuming you knew the hardware level instructions to send to the
controllers). Unfortunately I don't know those settings, so I can't say
what is and isn't possible.

The only upside is at least all disk makers seem to be amalgamating into
either: Fujitsu, Hitachi, Quantum, Seagate, and WD, so figuring out the
standards shouldn't be *too* hard =).

-Garrett

gary-the-thrifty

Hello again all,
I was wondering if there was an automatic, and possibly timed means to
spin down disks available in either ports or the base system, by
chance. Just trying to cut down on energy use, and increase my disks'
lives :). TIA,
-Garrett
personally, my solution for solving the "lower power consumption but still remotely available" issue, by configuring Wake On Lan. my web server is always on, so i just installed net/wakeonlan there. simple lines in crontab wake all the rest of my hosts each morning (after im gone to the office of course) for backups, and then they all power themselves back down about 2 hours later. during the day, if i need to get to a system while im still remote, i just log into the webserver and wake it backup again.

i would agree that the greatest stress on a disk might just be while its turning on from cold... but with the warranties that seagate is offering these days, i feel bold enough to power them off/on at least once a day.
Well, I feel the same but only about WD's drives. Seagate's newer drives seem to die a lot more frequently than they used to (I've had 4 / 7 Seagate drives die on me in the past few months and 1/6 WD drives die on me).

But then again that's my take on stuff :).

-Garrett
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