On Thu Oct 21 10, Bruce Cran wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Oct 2010 14:33:49 +0200
> Dag-Erling Smørgrav <d...@des.no> wrote:
>
> > The problem with setting a short idle timeout is that, on a typical
> > laptop or desktop system, you end up spinning the disk down and back
> > up several hundred times a day, which increases power consumption, I/O
> > latency and wear.
>
> Do we think our users are silly enough to set a short timeout of just a
> few minutes? I'd think most would use a setting of 20-30 minutes at
> a minimum. I never did understand why there were so many warnings;
> after all, some laptops even come with a default APM scheme in their
> HDDs that powers the disk down after 7 seconds!
personally i still think something like the attached patch would be nice to
have. there's a chance users might type the following:
'atacontrol spindown device 10'
thinking the timeout value is measured in minutes. although this gets mentioned
in atacontrol(4) it might still be worth reminding the user that he/she is
performing actions which could damage the hardware.
cheers.
alex
>
> --
> Bruce Cran
--
a13x
diff --git a/sbin/atacontrol/atacontrol.c b/sbin/atacontrol/atacontrol.c
index 4354ddf..75a131a 100644
--- a/sbin/atacontrol/atacontrol.c
+++ b/sbin/atacontrol/atacontrol.c
@@ -317,6 +317,10 @@ ata_spindown(int fd, const char *dev, const char *arg)
if (arg != NULL) {
tmo = strtoul(arg, NULL, 0);
+ if (tmo < 600)
+ warnx("setting spindown timeout below 10 minutes is \
+ not recommended (see EXAMPLES section of \
+ atacontrol(8))\n");
if (ioctl(fd, IOCATASSPINDOWN, &tmo) < 0)
err(1, "ioctl(IOCATASSPINDOWN)");
} else {
_______________________________________________
freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
