NAME

       scsi-spin - spin up and down a SCSI device

SYNOPSIS

       scsi-spin [-options...] [device]

DESCRIPTION

       scsi-spin let the user to manually spin up and down a SCSI device.

       This  command is particularly useful if you've got noisy (or hot) drives in a machine that
       you rarely need to access.  This is not the same  as  the  kernel  patch  that's  floating
       around  that  will  automatically  spin  down  the  drive  after  some time.  scsi-spin is
       completely manual, and spinning down a drive that's in use, especially the one  containing
       the scsi-spin binary, is probably a really bad idea.

       To avoid running in trouble with such cases, scsi-spin verifies that the device to work on
       is not currently in use by scanning  the  mounted  file  system  description  file  for  a
       partition living on it and issue an error if this the case.

OPTIONS

       -u, --up
              spin up device.

       -d, --down
              spin down device.

       -e, --loej
              load or eject medium from drive (use along with -u or -d )

       -w, --wait=[n]
              wait up to n seconds for the spin up/down command to complete. Default is to return
              immediately after the command was sent to the device.  Either repeat -w n times  or
              set n to define the time to wait before to report a timeout.

       -l, --lock
              prevent removal of medium from device.

       -L, --unlock
              allow removal of medium from device.

       -I, --oldioctl
              use  legacy  ioctl  interface  instead of SG_IO to dialog with device (could not be
              supported on all platforms).  -e and -w are not allowed with this option.

       -v, --verbose=[n]
              verbose mode. Either repeat -v or set n accordingly to  increase  verbosity.  1  is
              verbose, 2 is debug (dump SCSI commands and Sense buffer).

       -f, --force
              force spinning up/down the device even if it is in use.

       -n, --noact
              do nothing but check if the device is in use.

       -p, --proc
              use /proc/mounts instead of /etc/mtab to determine if the device is in use or not.

       device the  device  is any name in the filesystem which points to a SCSI block device (sd,
              scd) or generic SCSI device (sg). See section below.

SCSI devices naming convention

   Old kernel naming convention
       It is typically /dev/sd[a-z] , /dev/scd[0-9]* or /dev/sg[0-9]*.

   scsidev naming convention
       It is typically /dev/scsi/s[rdg]h[0-9]*-e????c?i?l?  or /dev/scsi/<aliasname>.

   devfs naming convention
       It is typically /dev/scsi/host[0-9]/bus[0-9]/target[0-9]/lun[0-9]/disc (same  for  cd  and
       generic   devices)   or  short  name  /dev/sd/c[0-9]b[0-9]t[0-9]u[0-9]  when  devfsd  "new
       compatibility entries" naming scheme is enabled.

SEE ALSO

       scsiinfo(8), sg_start(8), sd(4), proc(5),

AUTHORS

       Eric Delaunay <delaunay@debian.org>, 2001
       Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu>, 1998

                                        03 September 2001                            scsi-spin(8)