Power down a hard drive?

[Deleted member 2077]

I have a few SATA drives in my system. The only time I use them is to make snapshots or quick backups of things. They aren't critical, just convenient; I still have slow tape backups I could restore from.

90% of the time I keep them umounted. I only mount them when I want to copy files over.

Is there anyway to power down or even shutoff these drives when not in use/mounted?

 

[mav@]

If you are using legacy ata(4) stack - try `atacontrol spindown ...`. If you are using new CAM-based ATA stack - respective thread was solved only few days ago: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=8841 .