Re: (es)ata drives may need an explicit spinup command?

On Thu, Aug 06, 2009 at 10:56:44PM +0300, Alexander Motin wrote:
> Juergen Lock wrote:
> > So I tested esata on a siis pcie card with a 750G Seagate Freeagent Pro
> > drive and it does work - until the drive falls into powersave mode
> > after being idle for a little while. :(  (I had the drive on 1394
> > before on another box where it was able to recover from this condition,
> > but not on usb or esata - and the drive's 1394 interface died a while
> > ago and also esata is faster anyway...)
> > 
> >  And now I came across this patch for the linux ata driver:
> > 	http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/jgarzik/libata-dev.git;a=commitdiff;h=169439c2e35f01e7832a9b4fc8a7446980c3d593;hp=1e999736cafdffc374f22eed37b291129ef82e4e
> > 
> >  So my question is, could the same be done in our ata code?
> > I have a slight :) hope it would help this drive too at least as it
> > does seem to work on Linux...
> 
> I am not sure it is related to your case, as you said your drive works 
> for some time after plug. If drive spun-down automatically due to 
> inactivity, it should spin-up automatically also, as OS unable to track 
> that transition. 30 seconds of ATA command timeout should be sufficient 
> for drive to do this. Do you have any other symptoms?

Well the drive becomes completely `dead' for our drivers once in this
state, and when I try an atacontrol detach/attach on it at that point
its not even found anymore.  (And when I powercycle it by pulling its
little wall wart for a moment it comes back.)  Oh and I think I saw
something in our 1394 drivers too that does send something like a
spinup command...

 Also there have been threads on the net about Seagate external drives
not working properly on Linux for a few years as well because of this
powersaving `feature', and the drive does work on Linux here as I said
(at least on esata) so I suspected that commit might have been what
fixed it.

 Thanx,
	Juergen