How can I manually turn off the HDD?

[Daniel Rudy]

At about the time of 2/13/2007 10:58 AM, Chuck Swiger stated the following:
> On Feb 13, 2007, at 7:47 AM, deeptech71 at gmail.com wrote:
>> How can I turn off the HDD? .. and leave the buffers in the memory,  
>> until the RAM is full .. then spin up the drive, write out the  
>> data, then it turn off again.
> 
> ENOTSUPPORTED, at least with FreeBSD.  Note that Apple has done a lot  
> of work to facilitate drive spindown for power-saving reasons for  
> their laptops, so MacOS X will make a reasonable attempt to spindown  
> the drives until really needed....
> 

There is a port called ataidle that you may want to look at.  It
programs the HDD to spin down after a specified timeout.

-- 
Daniel Rudy