Power savings on USB Hard drives

[Laurent LEVIER]

Hi Bill,

At 19:21 02/12/2007, Bill Moran wrote:
>Are you sure the hardware is capable of spinning it down?
Bad comparison, but under Windows, USB HD power saves
And same physical HD on IDE on FreeBSD power saves too.

>If you have the drive connected, but unmounted does it spin down?
I did not check as this. Must do it.

>If so, would it work to just have a cron job that mounts/umounts the 
>partition at the beginning/end of backup runs?
Cron job for mounting/unmounting wont be good for me because I intend 
to use it later also for a file server.
However, if unmounted it power saves, I could use automount...

Brgrds