Oh how I love this community! Responses within 5 minutes!
Here's the original query:
> We've just added a 9Gb Seagate Barracuda SCSI drive into one of our
> DEC Alpha 500au machines running DU 4.0C. This is not being used as
> the system disk, but instead is being for data storage. The machine
> was a demo model in a previous life. We set up the disk using the
> graphical disk-tool and the disk is NSF'd to several other
> machines. Everything seems to work fine EXCEPT....the wretched thing
> goes to sleep. The disk appears to spin-down if it has not been
> accessed for about 20-30 minutes and it can take as much as about 30
> seconds to spin back up again when accessed. This is resulting in NSF
> errors all over the place, as well as mail getting bounced.
>
> I've talked to Seagate and they made some suggestions about the "power
> from drive" and "power from scsi bus" jumper settings, but none of
> their ideas worked. I am currently working around by having an ls
> command in the crontab executed every 15 minutes.
>
> Does any kind soul have any clues why this disk should be going to
> sleep? And what can we do to stop it?
The short and sweet answer is, as succinctly put by Sean O"Connell:
For whatever ever reason, Digital shipped these machines with
the power management turned on for the disks. You can used
dxpower to adjust the power management settings (adds some
stanzas to /etc/sysconfigtab).
Thanks to John Speno, Alan Rollow, Sean O'Connell, Sam Nelson,
Ronald D. Bowman and John Francini for their rapid responses.
Received on Thu Dec 17 1998 - 16:47:01 NZDT