Re: faster boots?

Bill Davidsen
2002-04-05T15:33:14Z

On Fri, 5 Apr 2002, [iso-8859-1] willy tarreau wrote:

> > It's normally done with hdparm spindown when idle
> > options...
>
> only supported on IDE devices.

I didn't have a machine to test, that's not clear from the man page:

Some options (eg. -r for SCSI) may not work with old ker-
nels as necessary ioctl()'s were not supported.

Although this utility is intended primarily for use with
(E)IDE hard disk devices, several of the options are also
valid (and permitted) for use with SCSI hard disk devices
and MFM/RLL hard disks with XT interfaces.
and

-S Set the standby (spindown) timeout for the drive.
This value is used by the drive to determine how
long to wait (with no disk activity) before turning
off the spindle motor to save power. Under such
circumstances, the drive may take as long as 30
seconds to respond to a subsequent disk access,
though most drives are much quicker. The encoding
of the timeout value is somewhat peculiar. A value
of zero means "off". Values from 1 to 240 specify
multiples of 5 seconds, for timeouts from 5 seconds
to 20 minutes. Values from 241 to 251 specify from
1 to 11 units of 30 minutes, for timeouts from 30
minutes to 5.5 hours. A value of 252 signifies a
timeout of 21 minutes, 253 sets a vendor-defined
timeout, and 255 is interpreted as 21 minutes plus
15 seconds.

so I thought this might be helpful for someone with the problem to
consider. I'll be building a suitable machine in the next few days, so I
will try it with current hdparm, just for my own edification.

There is a scsi-idle program of some age floating around, I haven't looked
at that but I know it exists. As I recall it used the sg interface, but
that's purely what I remember from the days when a 600MB Maxtor made me a
king. I went through a few years ago and backed them all up to one CD
each...

--
bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
CTO, TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.