Power savings on USB Hard drives

[Bill Moran]

Laurent LEVIER <llevier-lists at argosnet.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Guys,
> 
> I am using FreeBSD 6.2, soon 7.0 over a server and a laptop.
> 
> I would like, on both configurations, to be able to have hard drive 
> power savings as on internal IDE drives.
> 
> At the moment, my external USB2 drive, when mounted but even not 
> adresses, keeps running permanently despite it is just mounted for 
> backups (no access out of backup times on sunday then).
> 
> I digged on mailing lists, but cant find why the HD keep running.
> 
> Can someone help?

Are you sure the hardware is capable of spinning it down?  If you have
the drive connected, but unmounted does it spin down?  If so, would it
work to just have a cron job that mounts/umounts the partition at the
beginning/end of backup runs?

-- 
Bill Moran
http://www.potentialtech.com