ata: printf on every spinup/spindown?

[Garrett Cooper]

On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 1:19 PM, army.of.root
<army.of.root at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Andriy Gapon wrote:
>>
>> I am playing with ata spindown feature and I think that it is really
>> unnecessary
>> to print a message each time ata driver is going to spindown a disk or let
>> it be
>> spinned up:
>> ad6: Idle, spin down
>> ad6: request while spun down, starting.
>> ad6: drive spun down.
>> ad6: Idle, spin down
>> ad6: request while spun down, starting.
>>
>> Especially this is not useful when "Idle, spin down" messages are going
>> spin up
>> the disk via syslog logging to disk :-)
>>
>> Maybe put these under verboseboot if not drop entirely?
>>
>
> Hi,
>
> yah, I had some unpleasant experience with spinning down disks. That really
> is only useful for backup disks or similar disks which are not accessed
> frequently or used by any programs.
>
> :) The HDD consumes in Idle mode only something like 1W so it isnt really
> economic to spin it down.

Spinning down to a lower RPM seems legitimate, compared to spinning it
down, which kills the drives. Look at WD's green drives -- they claim
to get 30% ~ 50% better power efficiency than standard drives.

It may not seem like much, but HDD's really kill laptop batteries and
also really suck up juice in data centers. Any way to reduce energy
consumption without killing off hardware is really good in my book
8-).

Thanks PHK!
-Garrett