rdg@allegra.UUCP (Ron Gordon) (09/17/85)
Several vendors who provide external hard disk drives for the pc have incorporated a very nice feature in their device drivers: after the drive has been idle for about 10 seconds, they park the heads on the "landing zone" an area on the disk that is not used for data storage. this is normally done, for example, when the system is prepared for shipping by running a special software utility. however, it is very rare that an actual user takes the time or trouble to run such a utility by hand before moving the machine to a new location or rolling the machine to another's office. by incorporating this into the driver, the disk is much better protected each time the user turns off the machine or should a power outage occur. the standard ms-dos drivers for the internal 10Mb drive do not incorporate this feature. however, it shouldn't be too dificult to do by intercepting disk i/o calls and using the timer. all that is needed is a resident program to monitor disk activity and park the heads if no activity occurs in a 10 second period. has anyone written such a piece of code? any pc wizards who would like to rise to the occasion? please respond to allegra!rdg and i'll post the most well documented and cleanest solution that i receive. -ron gordon
jbn@wdl1.UUCP (09/21/85)
On decent disks, this happens automatically when you turn the power off. HyperDrive, for the MAC, for example. John Nagle