Re: [gentoo-user] Do I need hdparm for serial ATA drive?

[Paul Hartman <paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com>]

On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 10:22 AM, Mick <michaelkintzios@gmail.com> wrote:
> Newer machines invariably have SATA drives:
>
>           *-disk
>                description: ATA Disk
>                product: ST9500420ASG
>                vendor: Seagate
>                physical id: 0
>                bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0
>                logical name: /dev/sda
>                version: 0004
>                serial: 5VJ377P2
>                size: 465GiB (500GB)
>                capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos
>                configuration: ansiversion=5 signature=cf5ac2f0
>
> From dmesg:
>
> ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m2048@0xf1005000 port 0xf1005100 irq 35
> ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m2048@0xf1005000 port 0xf1005180 irq 35
>
> Do I need to emerge hdparm for such a drive?

As long as the drivers are in your kernel the drives should work.
hdparm is not required to use your disks, but you can use it to change
power-saving mode etc. (for example my 2TB drive had very aggressive
spindown when power-saving was OFF, but when I use hdparm to turn
power-saving ON at the highest level, the crazy spindowns stopped)