Tool to set spindown time of 2 1/2 inch hds?

[Jerry]

Is there a tool that can set the spindown time of 2 1/2 inch hds? Mine stops spinning after about half an hour but it would be nice for some games if it could stop after just 5 mins of so.

[Solid Snake]

Hi Jerry. I also use a 2.5 inch HDD inside my AT1200. I have been using the PD utility HDSleep http://main.aminet.net/disk/misc/HDSleep.lha
for many years without trouble. User can set a delay as when to stop the HD spinning. Hope this helps!

[Jerry]

Thanks Solid Snake,
have to try it again but if I remember correctly hdsleep has to be run in a multitasking environment and won't shut the hd down if multitasking is off (as in whdload). The shutdown feature of the hd itself is independent of any userspace programs and I was hoping that there was some way to manipulate the time. Guess I'm outta luck and have to develop some other workaround...

[DopPie]

The HD Sleep tool sends something to the harddisk after a set period of time making the HD go to sleep. However most games turn off multitasking (whdload) and this will no longer work.

[mr_a500]

Is there a tool that can set the spindown time of 2 1/2 inch hds? Mine stops spinning after about half an hour but it would be nice for some games if it could stop after just 5 mins of so.

Half an hour? You're lucky - every 2.5" HD I've had since 2002 stops spinning after 10 seconds. This is extremely annoying because it's constantly spinning then stopping, spinning then stopping. After only 6 months my last 2.5" HD started making loud clicking and whining noises when stopping and starting up. I assume modern harddrives are meant for computers using Windows that are constantly writing to virtual memory swap files or doing infinte fastfind indexing so that it doesn't often stop spinning (unlike Amiga). I have also gotten lots of crashes when the harddrive spins down at the exact second that a program is trying to access the drive. My very old 2.5" HD had no spindown and is much more reliable (no clicks, no sudden crashes).

I wish there was a program to set the spindown time directly in the harddrive settings permanently or on startup (assuming the current 10 second spindown is set somewhere in the drive) instead of having a program constantly running in the background to force spindown at intervals. I'd set my spindown to something like 10 minutes.

[Jerry]

Ok, 10 secs is a bit harsh. 10 mins would be perfect for me, too. I guess I'll copy the game over to ram, run hdsleep and the the program. Is a bit of a hassle but I love the sheer sound of silence...

[mr_a500]

Yes, the "sheer sound of silence" is nice. That's why I'm thinking of getting a CF to IDE adapter and running my Amiga on compact flash cards and avoid the whole spindown nonsense. Then I can have "severe sheer silence".

[rare_j]

Originally Posted by mr_a500

Yes, the "sheer sound of silence" is nice. That's why I'm thinking of getting a CF to IDE adapter and running my Amiga on compact flash cards and avoid the whole spindown nonsense. Then I can have "severe sheer silence".

CF is excellent but they have a few oddities. The one I have won't work with IDEfix at all, isn't recognised as a drive by HDtoolbox (although it does read the geometery ok-ish) and refuses to accept an IDE slave on its channel (ATAPI slave is ok, and having an IDE master works with it ok set as a slave, but IDE slave on the same channel cant be seen by the system if CF is the master). Who knows what other surprises it's got in store for me.

Aside from those quirks I'd say yes go for it. They're very quick and 1GB can be had for under £20 now.

[Jerry]

CF is a nice idea though I'm a bit concerned of how long they will survive with their limited lifetime and the prize/size ratio isn't that great if you have a spare 2 1/2 notebook hd flying around for free

[Chain]

i have IBM Travelstar drive inside a1200 and it seems it have this mechanism native, after 15 mins it spin down self

[Jerry]

That's what I meant. My drive has this feature native,too, but I hoped that there was some standartized way to set the spindown time.
Problem for me is that I use some whdload games that completely preload the disks and only need to access diskimages when going out of the game to save the highscores eg. Pinball Dreams/Fantasies. It would be so practical if hd would shutdown right after reading the diskimages. I suggested something like this to the whdload team once but no one really seemed interested. Shouldn't be too hard to implement as the sources of eg HDSleep come with the program...

[adolescent]

For IBM/Hitachi drives you can use Feature Tool to set the APM (power management which includes spin-down) and other settings. I'm sure there are similar tools for other brands.

You need to run these on a PC (usually DOS based) but you only need to set the drives once.

[adolescent]

Forgot the link.

IBM/Hitachi Feature Tool
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

[Jerry]

Thanks a lot. I'm gonna try this as soon as I get a drive adaptor.

[patrik]

@mr_a500:

I don't know which brand of harddrive you have, but drives generally can have their power managment adjusted or even shut of. Here is for example a utility to let you do that with Hitachi drives.

This would ofcourse require you to temporarily connect it to a pc to run the utility, but it sounds like it would be a good idea for you to disable the internal power managment of your drive completely, given how it behaves with it enabled. Drives are usually not supposed to last much more than a bunch of hundred thousand spinup/spindowns, not even laptop drives.

(edit):

Woops! Just noticed that adolescent already beat me by about 7 hours .

[mr_a500]

That's good to know and thanks for the links, but I don't own a PC. It looks like from now on - whenever I buy a new HD - I'll have to search for a power management program, then try to find a PC to make the setting and then put it in my Amiga. I still think the 10 second spindown is a stupid default and they should put it at least to 2 minutes. (Compact Flash is looking better every day - anybody know where to find an adapter in Canada?)

My last harddrive actually was an IBM Travelstar 2.5" made in mid 2002 (just before they sold to Hitachi). From the beginnning I wanted to find a way to shut off the power management, but couldn't find a way. After only 6 months it was squealing and clonking when it did a spindown after 10 seconds of inactivity (which on the Amiga is after every time I opened a file or program). Then it got much louder and the "clonk" noises turned to "clonking crunches". Then one day it just wouldn't start up.

My new harddrive is a Samsung made in mid 2005. It also has the 10 second spindown but seems to be lasting a bit longer. It now hisses and I get the occasional crash on spindown.

[rare_j]

The limit on CF is on writes/erases only I believe. As I understand it read operations are limitless.
If you're going to try compact flash check the specifcations. A regular CF card may specify "Durability : 10,000 insertion/removal cycles" which is great for a camera but perhaps slightly low for an Amiga, depending on how much disk crunching you plan on doing.
CF cards marketed as 'Industrial' may specify "Durability : >100,000 program/erase cycles" which isn't too far off the spin-up/down cycles limit on laptop HDDs mentioned earlier.
ATM I'm using an old 64mb CF out of a camera I've had for years.

[Jerry]

Yes, the limit of CF-cards is with writes/erases cycles but I think it's a bit more crucial than the spinup/down times of hds because some programs write a lot of log or other temporary files to disk (like webbrowsers) and they might quickly get to the 10000 cycles that way. That's why I was hoping to find some tool that would quickly change the timeout of my hd so I could adjust it to my current needs.
A port of unix-hdparm would be handy for that but I couldn't find something like this.

[ganralf]

A couple of weeks ago I undusted my A1200. After playing around around with it and looking on the net whats going on in the amiga scene I came across this great forum and finally that thread. Actually I expected a link to some decent tool, that would tweak the spindown time. Not in that case. So I started to write my on tool. This would by a good project to get back into amiga programming after more than ten years.

Now I would like to ask you to "beta" test my first results. Well it is not really beta, it is more a proof of concept version. I must state the usual warnings about destroying your data or even your hardware. Please ead the readme before you try the program.

[jrom]

eat the readme?!