I found out after posting that this is governed by the -n parameter to smartd. The default behavior is "-n never" which means smartd will send the cmds regardless of the drive status. The man page indicates that may cause the drive to spin-up to answer the cmds. It appears for some drives (?) the cmds just timeout and libata performs a soft reset. I'm going to change my setup to "-n standby", but it seems strange to me that "-n never" is the default if it has this drastic of a result (at least under Linux). Is there any way to know if the drive will actually spin up as a result of the cmd instead of timing out?
On 10/6/07, Tejun Heo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > smartd should probably issue CHECK POWER MODE (0xe5) before issuing > other commands. Bruce? - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
