Hi,

At 10:19 Uhr +0100 21.12.2001, Ken Hughes wrote:

>I have a similar query ...
>I wonder what I would have to configure if say
>I wanted to actually put a little toggle switch on the
>hot lead to the SCSI drive's power supply, and actually
>turn the drive(s) off when they are particularly idle.

I never tried something like that, but I don't think it's easy.

First of all, you'd probably have to get rid of any cron-jobs that may be
kicking around, then you should turn of logging everywhere, but even then,
there would still be problems.

Any attempt at creating temporary files, and probably also any attempt at
creating something in /var/lock/ would probably stop the whole machine
until the drives come back to life.

Even minor termination problems are quite bothersome in this respect: The
kernel will usually wait for all pending SCSI-commands to time out, and
then reset the whole SCSI-bus, which takes quite a while.

If you don't need the speed of a HD, you might perhaps try to put the
system on a ZIP or MOD-drive, both systems are quite quiet.

Regards!

	Alex