Spin down HDD after disk sync or before power off

[Daniel Thiele]

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Oliver Fromme wrote:
| Octavian Covalschi wrote:
|  > I'm looking a way to spin down HDD just right before power off. Why?
|  >
|  > Because currently when I call "shutdown -p now", HDD is powered off
at it's
|  > full speed (7200.4) and as a result
|  > I hear a noise of stopping/spinning down of HDD, and _this_
concerns me as
|  > I'm afraid it can damage HDD.
|  [...]
|  You can't do anything from
| userland at this point.  If you want to insert a spin-down
| for your disks, you will have to modify the kernel.

That is what I did and am still doing successfully since 2006.
See
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-acpi/2006-January/002375.html
for my initial problem description and
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-acpi/2006-February/002566.html
for the "solution". Note that back then David Tolpin
(dvd at davidashen.net) suggested to use
" ... & (ATA_SUPPORT_APM|ATA_SUPPORT_STANDBY)"
instead.

I don't know if that is the way it should be done, but for me it worked
across 3 hard disks and two notebooks so far. I am aware that 3 disks
and 2 notebooks provide very limited test results, but maybe this work
around solves your problem, too.

It would still be great, though, if a proper solution for this could be
permanently implemented into FreeBSD. That is, if the current behaviour
really is not that healthy to hard drives, as Joerg suggested.

Best regards,

Daniel
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