Jaz and ZIP spinup/spindown question

[Mike McWhinney]

Hello,

Is there a way to modify the spinup/spindown time for
ZIP and especially Jaz drives. We have a computer with a bank
of 4 Jaz drives. Every ten minutes of inactivity (approximately),
the system will spindown all of the Jaz drives. Then when the
user returns and performs about any activity the drives spin up, usually
taking 20-30 seconds. During this time the computer is very un-responsive.
Is there a way to change this inactivity timeout to say 1-2 hours
so that this annoyance does not manifest itself?

Thanks.

Mike McWhinney

[D***@ix.netcom.com]

Post by Mike McWhinney
Is there a way to modify the spinup/spindown time for
ZIP and especially Jaz drives. We have a computer with a bank
of 4 Jaz drives. Every ten minutes of inactivity (approximately),
the system will spindown all of the Jaz drives. Then when the
user returns and performs about any activity the drives spin up, usually
taking 20-30 seconds. During this time the computer is very un-responsive.
Is there a way to change this inactivity timeout to say 1-2 hours
so that this annoyance does not manifest itself?

Iomega's software used to include a sleep time setting which you could
set to up to 60 minutes for a Jaz drive. I think they removed that
feature at some point (I haven't been keeping up with the more recent
versions of IomegaWare).

What OS are you using? If it's Win98, then I'm sure there are
versions of IomegaWare which you can use that have the sleep time
setting.

[Mike McWhinney]

Post by D***@ix.netcom.com
What OS are you using? If it's Win98, then I'm sure there are
versions of IomegaWare which you can use that have the sleep time
setting.

We *were* using Win98SE, but now have migrated to WinXP Home.
We are phasing out these drives, and may for the phase out period, use
one drive to copy the zip and jaz cart contents to a hard drive or other
media storage device. I was more or less curious if this option could
be changed.

Mike

[D***@ix.netcom.com]

Post by Mike McWhinney
We *were* using Win98SE, but now have migrated to WinXP Home.
We are phasing out these drives, and may for the phase out period, use
one drive to copy the zip and jaz cart contents to a hard drive or other
media storage device. I was more or less curious if this option could
be changed.

I think the sleep time is a function of the drive's firmware, but I'm
not aware of any Iomega software that works under XP that can
communicate with the drive to change its sleep time setting. Perhaps
if you set up the computer to dual boot with Win98SE, you could boot
to that and use an older version of IomegaWare to change the setting
before booting back to XP (or you might be able to do it from DOS).
I expect the drive would retain the setting until it was powered down.

[Richard L. Hamilton]

Post by D***@ix.netcom.com

Post by Mike McWhinney
We *were* using Win98SE, but now have migrated to WinXP Home.
We are phasing out these drives, and may for the phase out period, use
one drive to copy the zip and jaz cart contents to a hard drive or other
media storage device. I was more or less curious if this option could
be changed.

I think the sleep time is a function of the drive's firmware, but I'm
not aware of any Iomega software that works under XP that can
communicate with the drive to change its sleep time setting. Perhaps
if you set up the computer to dual boot with Win98SE, you could boot
to that and use an older version of IomegaWare to change the setting
before booting back to XP (or you might be able to do it from DOS).
I expect the drive would retain the setting until it was powered down.

It is a feature of the drive's firmware, and if you have the tech manual
(good luck! they weren't exactly set up to handle attempts to order it
when I did ages ago), you could probably write a program that would use a
special SCSI command to set the sleep interval. As I recall, the possible
range was 0 to 255 minutes (with 0 totally disabling auto-sleep), and
anything outside of 1 to 63 was not recommended (too much wear and/or
risk, perhaps). I did this as a modification to a Solaris variant of
a Linux utility command called ziptool, but I've never polluted my mind
with Windows programming, so I can't help there with the details.

I don't remember whether or not the sleep time would be remembered
across a power off of the drive, although I somewhat doubt it.