[ltp] HDAPS and drives that can't park & can you park 2 drives (main+ultraybay)?

[Marc MERLIN]

On Thu, Dec 27, 2007 at 09:51:08AM +0100, Adam Sloboda wrote:
> > My drive info is pasted below, and as 
> > http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_APS_harddisk_parking
> > says, when I shake, move my laptop, I get:
> > kernel: scsi_protect_queue(): head park not requested, used standby!..
> > with 
> > gandalf:~# cat /sys/block/sda/queue/protect_method
> > auto unload [standby]
> > 
> > If I set unload, I get:
> > kernel: scsi_protect_queue(): head NOT parked!..
> > kernel: scsi_unprotect_queue(): No pending I/O, re-enabling power management..
> 
> And can you hear that specific parking sound?
 
I think I actually hear the drive spinning down and up, which is bad.
Ah, I see 'standby' actually means spinning down. Indeed, I need to turn that
off so that I don't kill my drive's MTBF

> Standby spins down -- it's slow and shortens lifetime (I don't
> remember the expected lifetime numbers for notebook disks).

10,000 to 100,000 give or take, but hdapsd would trigger that too
quickly IMO.

> > If I want to park my 2nd drive, do I need to run two /usr/sbin/hdapsd, one
> > for sda, and one for sdb, or can it be told to do both drives at once?
> 
> Let me guess, this is the drive which came in with notebook?  Head
> unloading won't work on any random disk.
 
Correct, the stock drive is in the ultrabay, and the boot drive is a new
drive. It looks like it's hard to find if park will work with a given
third party drive before buying it :-/

> Unloading for more drives probably needs simple patch or feature
> request.

Just curious about this: does it mean that all drives support some kind
of head parking, but that the command is different, and the current
kernel doesn't know what the right unload command for each drive is?

If so, any idea where I'm likely to find new unload command patches
now, or in the future?

Thanks again for your help.
Marc
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