[Info-vax] unused SAS SFF disk spin status?

[Steven Schweda]

On Aug 19, 2:12 pm, "Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilber... at comcast.net>
wrote:

> I believe that you can simply dismount the drive and it will spin down.

   I know nothing, but I wouldn't bet on it.  I suspect that you could
fiddle with the drive's firmware, or with a jumper on the drive, and
get
the drive not to spin up by default at power-on.  Once it's spinning,
I'd guess that someone would need to send it a command to get it to
spin
down, and I doubt that even DISMOUNT /UNLOAD would do that for a hard
disk drive.

   I can't remember seeing a ready-to-use program which would send the
appropriate (SCSI) command(s) to a device on a VMS system, but there's
some code in mtools which is intended to do things like eject a
cartridge from a Zip drive, and I'd bet that that could (with no great
effort) be adapted to do Stop/Start Motor instead of Eject/Load
Medium.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCSI_Start_Stop_Unit_Command
      http://antinode.info/dec/sw/mtools.html