ATA harddrive sleep/spindown timout?

[Svein Halvor Halvorsen]

* Graham North [2005-02-23 22:36 -0800]
>  Is it possible to put ata harddrives in spindown/sleep/suspend mode 
>  without putting the whole system to sleep/suspend?

Take a look at ataidle in the ports collection.

Note that the disk will come back to life again when you access it, and 
that several processes do exactly this all the time. In order for ataidle 
to be very useful, you'd have to twaek the system's crontabs et.al.