ATA APM and NCQ support in FreeBSD atacontrol

[Ian Smith]

On Sun, 11 May 2008 jonathan at kc8onw.net wrote:
 > Has any work been done recently towards adding SATA Native Command
 > Queueing as well as ATA APM and acoustic management to FreeBSD?
 > 
 > I found this PR (with patch) to add APM and acoustic management control to
 > atacontrol.  The PR was opened in May 2005 has not been changed since
 > December 2006 and is still open.
 > http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=81692&cat=
 > 
 > I have not been able to find much of anything on SATA NCQ in FreeBSD newer
 > than 2005 or 2006 does anyone know anything newer?

Jeremy has addressed the NCQ issue, about which I know nothing.

As for APM and AAM, that functionality is handled by sysutils/ataidle,
which that PR appears - on a quick glance - to pretty well duplicate. 

I see phk@ recently added an 'atacontrol spindown' command to HEAD and
RELENG_7 that appears to offer similar functionality to 'ataidle -S
standby_mins' or 'ataidle -I idle_mins', though specified in seconds
instead.  However this doesn't address acoustic management.

Or is ataidle broken for SATA disks?

cheers, Ian