On Wed, Apr 10, 2002 at 12:23:27PM -0700, Preston L. Bannister wrote: > From: Eric W. Biederman > > I've just done some investigating, possibly duplicating work, > > and dug into the IDE spinup issue. My conclusion, the Linux > > kernel is buggy. > > To be fair - the Linux kernel doesn't usually have to handle > IDE spin up on boot, as this occurs during BIOS initialization. > > I do wonder how well Linux handles the case where a drive > is configured to spin-down after some time. I suspect not > at all well :).
Actually, I think it handles this pretty easily. The drive is simply spun up as soon as the next operation arrives. I do this for disks that I only use for backups, where I'd like the drive spun down (in case somebody pushes the machine off a desk, spun down drives can take more G's :)
