# Power down a hard drive?



## Deleted member 2077 (Aug 3, 2010)

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?


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## mav@ (Aug 3, 2010)

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 .


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