> months--it would no longer spin up unless I shake it. Evidently, being
> spundown for extended periods of time, with power still on caused the
> dreaded "stiction" problem. Granted, this was an old drive (an 80MB
> Quantum SCSI), but still.........
Is spindown any worse than reboot to DOS, hard reset, and power off?
Most people do (some of) these things every day.
At 26 hours, I do not think a BBS would spin down the disks.
You can always change that to 720 hours or disable it.
For most people, 26 hours is good.
------
You missed my point(s).
* If you make the idle timeout very very large, you might as well not do it,
as it will never spin down.
* "power off" is a LOT different from "spin-down with power on". For one
thing, the drive assumes room temperature. With power applied, there is
certainly heat in the drive case.
* The "stiction" is claimed to be from lubricant migrating to the area
between the heads and the platters, and creating enough grab (surface
tension?) so that the spindle motor can't start the platters spinning.
Warm/hot lubricant will certainly flow into this critical area much
easier than cold lubricant.
And finally:
* If there is a significant chance of messing up a disk drive, why take that
chance? Manufcaturers rate the running MTBF, and the number of stop/start
cycles, but AFAIK *NOT* the "spun down with power applied" time. It's quite
possible (likely?) that the drives are NOT designed or certified or tested
for operation this regime.
-30- Ray