Tejun Heo wrote: > sd doesn't stop (unload head) on shutdown. This behavior is necessary > for multi initiator cases. Unloading head by powering off stresses > the drive and sometimes produces distinct clunking noise which > apparently disturbs users considering multiple reports on different > distributions. halt(8) usually puts the drives to sleep prior to > shutdown but the implementation is fragile and it doesn't work with > sleep-to-disk. > > This patch implements sd attribute stop_on_shutdown. If set to 1, sd > stops the drive on non-restarting shutdown. stop_on_shutdown is > initialized from sd parameter stop_on_shutdown_default which defaults > to 0. So, this patch does not change the default behavior. Tejun, The IMMED bit in the START STOP UNIT cdb is not being set when your patch stops a drive: Advantage: - the power won't be dropped immediately after sending the command to the drive (assuming the drive gets its power from the same power supply that shutdown turns off) Disadvantage: - it will delay shutdown proportional to the number of drives with the stop_on_shutdown attribute set. Say 5 seconds per disk. Disadvantage (with or without IMMED bit set): - if another initiator (e.g. on another machine) was using a different partition on that disk, then it might get upset (especially if it was running Linux). [I'm not sure why you say this patch is necessary in this case.] BTW SCSI disks typically have a lower start-stop lifetime rating than ATA disks. This reflects that SCSI disks are designed to be on 168 hours per week. Doug Gilbert - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html