[SPARCbook] controlling spin-down times on a SCSI drive...

[William M. Perry]

Well, I finally have Linux 2.3.5 and Solaris 2.6 dual-booting off of my
SPARCbook 3GX, but there is one problem.

I replaced the hard drive on my tadpole with a 6.2GB toshiba, fairly
straightforward.  But every once in a while the drive goes to sleep, and
never seems to get woken up.  Symptoms are that the kernel spits out
warnings about target @ 3,0 not responding, does a SCSI bus reset, all to
no avail.  The only thing that brings the drive back is to L1-A then power
it off.  probe-scsi from the PROM shows nothing after this happens, very
bizarre.

I modified my solaris power management configuration to not power manage
the hard drive, but cannot find any good way to do this from linux.  I have 
set the `spin-disks-down?' PROM variable to 'false', with no effect.

It is really annoying to have to power down the linux box if I am not
actively accessing the disk. :(

This drive is actually an IDE drive with an IDE->SCSI converter, but
`hdparm' still (understandably) gripes that the spin-down-time can only be
set on IDE drives.  *sigh*

-Bill P.

PS: please forgive the crossposting