That should be the manufacturer's default standby / idle timer. In the default setup solaris does not change the timer.
No, what he's describing is the idle behavior of Momentus drives. After 5 seconds of inactivity, it parks the heads off-platter to ostensibly reduce drag on the platters, which again supposedly reduces power consumption. Since the parking noise is relatively loud, you could get the impression of a spin-down.
That behavior can be controlled. It's called APM (Advanced Power Management, unrelated to the system APM). You control it via an ATA feature register. In Solaris there's no way to set those. The newest build comes with sg3_utils, one of its tools theoretically allows doing exactly that, except that the Solaris port fails at doing that due to USCSI or whatever (the interface used in Solaris).
And this isn't just an issue with Seagate drive. A related Ubuntu thread listed a couple of other manufacturers and models, too. Over in Linuxland, the issue was quickly fixed with hdparm.
Acoustic Management is another drive feature controlled via an ATA feature register. In Solaris, they map that feature to a SCSI modepage. I wish they'd do the same for APM, to get some way to get this under control.
Regards, -mg _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
