Hi!
I have a harddrive that I use in school.
I allso wanna use it at home...
It's built into a 5.25" rack, and is non-hotswap.
My rack has a power key wich I can use to unpower the device.
My question is, does the drive take damage if I just umount and run hdparm -y <dev> on it?
I guess it does 
cus fsck.ext3 runs at start up=)
Anybody else who got an idea?
I have never had any problems when doing a similiar process under FreeBSD using cam control but I don't know about IDE devices. When you power down the drive does it truly power down like a SCSI device?
As long as any buffer in the HD is commited to the filesystem before removal you should be ok but I am not too trusting of IDE. It really wasn't meant for that.
There are hot-swappable IDE cards made by Promise though, but I do not know of their level of Unix support.
Okey, thanks for the reply.
I really dont know if it really powers down, it's a quiet diskdrive =) but I maybe should check if there is a current on the contact to the IDE drive.
I'm running a Promise card (for ATA133) but it's not hotswap...
Maybe I should take a look att that one...
Thanks allot!