Hi Marcos, Jack, > Readme.Txt says "Power-saving features such as a 'drive > spin-down timeout' should be DISABLED". ... > Is that what I should disable? If so, does this mean that > the hard disk must keep running all the time if UIDE is used?
Of course DOS will freeze for a short moment when it has to wait for a harddisk to spin up again, but as I never had a bigger problem than that with power-saving in DOS without UIDE, I would like to suggest the opposite of what the UIDE readme.txt seems to say at the moment: Could UIDE be used to configure the power saving timeout of your harddisks? The involved IDE/ATA commands are relatively simple. They could be sent to either all disks which, based on their self-ID, support power saving, or to one selected disk, using any suitable command line syntax for the latter. Of course UIDE should in addition be able to wait in a safe way when it encounters a sleeping disk which has to spin up first. Should be possible with small error handling changes. This is not to be confused with e.g. "bus tri-state" or with "power-up in standby" or similar "extreme power savings". It is also possible to either standby or suspend disks. I think the best combination of comfort and savings is STANDBY mode, as SUSPEND (sleep, communication shut down) would require a drive reset to wake up which would need extra error handling and automatic reset / retry etc, in short would be annoying. Standby simply means the drive spins down so the next attempt to access it will take a while because the drive will have to spin up again first. Harddisks have a built-in timer for this and only need a setup command once to enable auto-sleep. The setup uses one byte to specify the timeout in a slightly weird way: 0 = none, 1..240 = N*5 seconds, 241..251 = (N-240)*30 min which means 5 sec to 20 min or 0.5 to 5.5 hours timeout :-) Setting the spin-down timeout at the moment when UIDE is loaded would be a nice combination to would avoid needing other tools. Regards, Eric PS: Bus tri-state is at most useful for non-hot unplugging and needs a heavy reset to re-start the drive, while powering up in standby is for people who want to reduce boot-up "power peaks" by keeping non-boot(!) disks in standby until they are actually needed. Setting this for a boot disk would be very strange: It would not save energy and a BIOS timeout might skip the disk. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Achieve unprecedented app performance and reliability What every C/C++ and Fortran developer should know. Learn how Intel has extended the reach of its next-generation tools to help boost performance applications - inlcuding clusters. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-dev2devmay _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
