Amiga ISO Collection/AmigaUtilCD1.iso/Disk&HD/UNT-QSCS.LHA/quietscsi.doc

Text File | 1994-10-19 | 7.5 KB | 186 lines

                                 QuietSCSI

             a program to prevent harddisks from making noise

                              initial release

                      by F.J. Reichert, 19/10/1994


UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED, ALL FILES ARE Copyright © 1994 by F.J. Reichert.
All Rights Reserved. WARNING: THIS IS *NO* PUBLIC DOMAIN PROGRAM, BUT A
COPYRIGHTED PIECE OF SOFTWARE.

Franz-Josef Reichert
Kuchlingerstraße 13
D-66271 Kleinblittersdorf, GERMANY
FAX: [phone]
eMail: [e-mail]

· Disclaimer

The author disclaims all warranties, express or implied, including, but not
limited to, any implied warranties of merchantability and/or fitness for a
particular purpose. The author does not warrant, guarantee or make any
representations regarding the use of, or the output from, the program. You
rely on the program and output solely at your own risk. In no event will
the author be liable for any action, including lost profits, incidental or
consequential damages arising out of the use or inability to use this
software, exceed the possible shareware fee you paid for this software,
even if the author or an authorized distributor of this software has been
advised of the possibility of such damages.

· Distributing this program

This piece of software, including all accompanying files in the archive, is
what some people tend to call »Freeware«. This implies:

This program may be freely DISTRIBUTED, by any means, as long as there are
no charges specifically for the program. Charges for downloading from
electronic BBS systems or network services, or charges for copying and
media for freely redistributable software libraries are certainly
permissible. The entire archive has to be left intact and unchanged. You
must not distribute any changed or imcomplete set of the original archive.

· Using this program

This program may be USED for any purposes, commercial, personal, public,
and private, as long as ALL of this text, all files, copyright, mailing
address, and this notice are retained in their entirety. It is provided
without warranty of any kind, so use it at your own risk!

This piece of software, which includes all accompanying files in the
archive, is what some people tend to call »Giftware«. This implies:

    · You may use it as often as you like

    · You may use it as long as you like

    · You are *NOT* obliged to pay anything for using it

    · You *can* send a donation to the author, if you feel
      so or if you like to do so

    · If you like to send a donation to the author, you can pay any
      amount you think that this piece of software is worth it

    · Thank you for supporting a poor programmer, who still insists in
      writing quality amiga software ;-)


· What this program actually does

· The problem

Do you remember your first Amiga 1000 computer? Everybody asked you 'Is it
really on' when they saw it first, since it was so q-u-i-e-t. I'll never
forget that perfect feeling having a nice, quiet computer on my desk. Nine
years later! Computers make noise. Computers which contains a harddisk make
even more noise. Computers containing several harddisks make even much more
noise. And they burn energy! Today, people spend a lot of $$$ to buy
themselves screen blankers. And cooling fans which make less noise than the
el-cheapo thingies all power supply manufacturers use. Oh well, everybody
has a low power monitor and computer. But nobody realized, that a harddisk
spins most time of the day without reading or writing a single byte! It
just spins, burns a lot of energy, and makes noise.

Can you sleep in the same room when your computer is on? I can not! The
harddisks make too much noise. Well, the power supply fan makes noise, too.
But since I got a temperature controlled model, I can stand it much better.
And there's another problem. The power led. Yes, it's so bright that I can
read books!

· The solution

Speaking of SCSI harddisks, there is a mechanism to switch the motor off.
It will just stop to spin as if you switched your computer off. But the
drive is not dead. It's just q-u-i-e-t. It won't allow you to read or write
data, though. But the controller electronic on the harddisk is still alive,
and it might get a command to restart the drive at any time. Then it will
behave just as if you switched your computer on. The motor will spin up
again, and the drive will be ready to read or write data.

This little program does exactly this. It monitors all read and write
accesses to the drive. It also monitors all input events. If there is
inactivity for a certain period of time, it will spin down the drive motor
and dim the power led. If the next command arrives, it will spin up the
motor and switch to led back to bright.

In other words: Leave your amiga alone for some time, and it will switch
the harddisk's motor and the power led OFF. Come back to your amiga after a
while, continue your work. You won't realize any difference, the harddisk
is still quiet. But the next time you try to read or write data from the
drive, it will switch the power led and the motor ON, and your harddisk
will spin up again. That's the whole magic. It save energy, and it saves
noise.

Maybe you run a BBS and only 2-3 users will log in during night? Or your
computer is alive to catch FAXes all nights, which will only happen once a
week or so? So this is for you!

· Starting the program

This one is really easy to use. Just put it to your startup-sequence:

    RUN <NIL: >NIL: quietscsi <device> <unit> <seconds>

where

    <device> is the name of your SCSI driver, e.g. scsi.device,
or gvpscsi.device.

    <unit> is the unit number where you harddisk is connected to. You
can figure this out by starting HDToolBox, for example.

    <seconds> is the number of seconds for the inactivity timeout. I
use 900 for approx. 1/4 hour, maybe you'd like another value. You shouldn't
choose the value too low, though. Switching the motor off and on very often
burns more energy and shortens your harddisk's lifetime (Well, don't go
nuts about that ;-)). In the current release, the timer is quite
inaccurate, since it doesn't compares with the system clock, just counts
timer requests of one second. So it may vary, maybe 900 means 16, 17 or
even 18 minutes. It is guaranteed to count always some seconds more, but
never less. This isn't a big problem in general. I was just too lazy to fix
it, maybe in the next release ;-).

· Quitting the program

You might want to try to send a <Ctrl>-<C> signal to the process. Either by
typing that to the shell you started it from (but that's not the way you
should do it, since it blocks a window), or by using the shell command
»break«. This *may* remove the patch. It is not guaranteed that it will
succeed, since there might be some requests in the queue which need to be
handled first. Just try a while later. Anyway, there shouldn't be a need to
remove the patch while your system is alive. I merely added that option for
debugging purposes. Well, maybe I shouldn't have told you that at all ;-).

· Things to do

You can send me a donation if you like. That's what *you* can do ;-).

Now the things that *I* plan to do when I notice that some people like my
program:

    · More accuracy for the timer

    · Add TSR startup code

    · Add some more command line options

    · Find a new girlfriend

    · Implement a commodity interface, perhaps a GUI which lets
      the user switch the drives off and on, select an new
      timeout and all those useful and marvellous things

    · Allow LUN and BOARD numbers

    · (...)

Maybe you have some more ideas! Let me know. Have fun using QuietSCSI, I
use it all the day. It's small, but it's probably one of the most useful
tools I ever wrote.

<EOT>