Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!husc6!cmcl2!nrl-cmf!ames!ubvax!weitek!sci!raymund
From: raymund@sci.UUCP (Raymund Galvin)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Warm Reboot and Hard Disk Noise
Summary: You must have a real crummy drive :)
Message-ID: <20570@sci.UUCP>
Date: 1 May 88 23:45:53 GMT
References: <8804300422.AA18746@decwrl.dec.com> <12083@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Organization: Silicon Compilers Systems Corp. San Jose, Ca
Lines: 22

In article <12083@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>, erd@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Ethan R. Dicks) writes:
< 
< Your drive buzzes on warm start, (like mine too), because the controller 
< forgets where the heads are when reset, and must get the heads back to a
< known place.  Since on the Amiga, the most likely place for the heads to be is
< over the root track,and most Amiga owners only have one BIG partition, that's 
< a lotta tracks to cover when pulling the heads to the edge of the disk. The
< noise you hear is as a result of either the hddisk.device stepping the tracks
< very fast to 0, or a command sent to the drive itself, telling it to reset the
< heads (I don't know which, because I don't know much about the hddisk.device)
< 

I doubt it. Two seconds of noise for a simple seek.  Give me a break.  
These days many drives are rated as having average seek times in the 
20-60 millisecond range.  An average seek for a drive translates to one 
third of a full stroke seek.   The absolute worst case seek shouldn't be more 
than 3 times the average seek time (usually it will be less).  I would 
bet that whoever wrote the code that is messing around with the hard 
disk (during reboots) is doing something silly.   I wish someone
from Commodore would explain what is happening.

Ray Galvin