Re: Automatic means for spinning down disks available?

On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 04:14:33PM -0700, Chuck Swiger wrote:
On Apr 11, 2007, at 3:32 PM, Gary Kline wrote:
Some things to consider (besides powering -down or -off drives)
are battery backup system. Don't most UPS systems isolate your
servers from the wall-socket?

The better grade of UPSes do exactly that-- they provide "galvanic
isolation" by using an isolation transformer which has the primary
and secondary windings completely separated, and ensuring in the
design that you don't connect the service neutral line to the output
or load's neutral line. The load can thus either be floating or tied
to the local building ground. This type of design is known as
"double-conversion" because they always feed the input AC line
through the rectifier & DC inverter, using more power but providing
better PFC and can provide the load with an AC frequency which is
different than the input AC frequency (ie, they can provide 60Hz
output from 50Hz input, or vice versa).

Years ago I spent a lot of money for a top notch surge
protector. It still protects everything to this day; and very
well. Now and then I'll find my LAN down, DNS too, obviously,
because of a surge of one sort or another. The power here
(Seattle) is pretty good -- well, except for wind storms {koff}.
But I'm way past due for having the sort of higher quality
UPS that you're taking about. It would be wired to a pipe struck
in the earth. Floating_ground just doesn't cut it. Any models
you'd recommend? How much system installation is required?
I'm CAT-5A cabled. Software, no problem; anything else is.


Cheaper UPSes, which include almost all consumer-grade models from
APC, Tripplite, etc run in "line interactive mode", which involves a
self-tapping or ferro-resonant transformer, can adjust the voltage up
or down within limits, but they do not perform PFC and cannot provide
frequency conversion, and they pass the neutral line from AC line to
load without isolation, thus passing common-mode noise through. This
design is lighter and requires fewer components (an isolation
transformer is heavier), and does not keep the DC section and
inverter always under full load, so are somewhat more efficient, but
cannot deal with frequency drift or significant voltage changes.


Understand, thanks, Chuck. Here (where rubber-meets-pavement
is where *not* to cheap out).




At what level do hard drives have identical circuitry so that
they can be software lower-voltaged?

The boards within a drive family might be identical (WD200BB/WD400BB/
WD800BB/etc), but they don't deal with under-voltages at all well--


{{ this is what i was afraid of.... }}


you'll either pull excessive current through the servo and spindle
motor windings, or perhaps the drive will fail to spin up entirely.
The spindle motors are designed to spin at the calibrated speed and


So, pragmatically, a drive is either going full-throttle or
it's OFF. ...Hm.

won't spin at slower speeds.


Somewhere, prhaps at the Gnome shutdown GUI (dialogue?)
it reads: Off, Changed-user, Idle, Power-Off, Reboot,
or whatever. Flame from Gnome/KDE folks to /dev/null, please.
I'm guessing the "Idle" is for the laptops. YEs/no?

Something else to consider here is how much power do the newer
40-60, 200-300GB drives suck up? I don't think the drain is
much compared to, say, 3 CRT television sets drowning on
several hours/day. Still, let's SWAG that there are 25-30
million of us nerd/geek types running at least one computer.
That adds up.


*Except for consumer __cost__*, why don't all boxes have builtin
batteries like laptop? ...There are lots of things to consider.

Cost is the primary reason why boxes don't have built-in batteries.
People flinch away from paying for real RAID systems which include
battery-backup for the drives...


Well, then I'm definitively part of the problem; suspect that
most of my kinsfolk are too. aNy idea how mmuch of this could be
solved by software? Maybe when a machine turns itself off at
03:30, it write a state-file. When it reboots {either by magic
timer or by actually crawling around down there and toggling
switches }, presto, you have everything just the way you left it.

puts("Feedback, world?");

gary




--
-Chuck


--
Gary Kline kline@xxxxxxxxxxx www.thought.org Public Service Unix

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