sata spindown

sata spindown

[Christopher Lansdown]

Hi,

Having a laptop with a SATA hard drive (with an intel ICH6M chipset), I've
been trying to find out the status both of spindown (a la 'hdparm -S') and
suspend/resume. Suspend/resume I've come to find out that Randy Dunlap is
working on (and I'm looking forward to being able to help out with testing
the patch when he posts it here).

So this leaves automatic inactivity spindown. Now, I did track down that in
recent kernels, one can do 'sdparm -C stop' to cause the drive to spin down
immediately, but this isn't a (direct) replacement for the IDE standby
timeout.

So I'm writing to inquire if this ability currently exists, or if not, if
anyone is working on it and, if so, if I can be of help with testing
patches. I'm a programmer and know a little bit about kernel drivers, though
I have no experience with scsi or ide drivers.

Thanks,
Chris Lansdown

-- 
"Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker 
will be sorry."  -- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
========== Evil Overlord Quote of the Day (www.eviloverlord.com) =========
222. I reserve the right to execute any henchmen who appear to be a little
too intelligent, powerful, or devious. However if I do so, I will not
at some subsequent point shout "Why am I surrounded by these
incompetent fools?!" 

Re: sata spindown

[Mark Lord]

Christopher Lansdown wrote:
>
> Having a laptop with a SATA hard drive (with an intel ICH6M chipset), I've
> been trying to find out the status both of spindown (a la 'hdparm -S') and
> suspend/resume....

Just keep doing it the way you have in the past:

"hdparm -C" gives the power status, and "hdparm -S" sets the spindown timeout.

This requires the "libata passthru" feature set, which most distro's patch
in by default these days.  Jeff is finally sending it upstream for future
kernels, too, and Andrew already has had it in -mm for some time now.

Cheers