> > The hard disk standby option is appreciated, but does anyone
> know how to
> > check to see if the hard disk is spinning or not?
>
> As the one who implemented it, i think that i should respond to your
> question. The ATA-protocol does not support a command to check wether
> the harddisk is spinning or not. Therefor, it's also not possible to
> display the current state of the harddisk.
>

Not that I'm concerned, but as a matter of curiousity... I've seen windows
and dos tools that indicate the state of the disk spindle? I assume they do
so by recording the sending of the "standby" command, and the first
subsequent read or write command.

But that's probably done transparently in the kernel in this case so no
option - right?

m/