Re: SCSI disk driver module spin-up
Albert Cahalan (albert@ccs.neu.edu)
Sat, 24 Feb 1996 18:58:08 -0500 (EST)
>> I wonder if it might not be more useful to only spin up drives
>> when they are actually needed, be it at mount time or even only
>> upon actual access. This might be especially useful for drives
>> used mainly as backup storage (e.g. to keep source trees that
>> only need to be accessed every other week)...
>
> I guess I am not really in favor of spinning down disks all the
> time. Most of the wear and tear that decreases the lifetime of a
> disk is at startup and shutdown, so unless there are power management
> reasons (i.e. on a laptop), I think it is probably better to simply
> leave the disks spinning all the time.
>
> In principle, it would probably not be that harmful to perform
> spinup/spindown on mount/unmount. Having an idle timer seems like a
> dangerous idea to me, as you could wear out a disk in a real hurry.
Well, what about a _long_ timeout?
Always spindown after 26 hours without an access.
Spindown after 1 hour if the last access was umount.
(the 26 is in case you do something one a day and are late)