easily turning drives on and off

[IIO]

does any of you know a utility which allows easy access to spin down and spin up again IDE, SATA (and eventually even firewire) HDs?

in OSX i use disc util to easily unmount and remount drives, then maybe i just leave it open and put it to background.

in OS9 all i could imagine is a set of custom apple-scripts which unmounts single volumes, then reactivate only all HDs at once using the disk tool. which is not what i am looking for.

plus, as we know, OS9 doesnt support turning firewire-connected drives OFF when unmounting the volume(s).

[Astroman]

Imho spinning up and down is the most critical part of any physical disk's operation.
(and the spin up sound a major annoyance anyway... )
The drive head is brought into (and out of) it's parking position by some complex movements.
And it has to lift off like an aeroplane each time...
When the disk is spinning idle it doesn't use much energy.

[IIO]

yeah that´s right. it is not an everydays solution.

but there are a lot of scenarios where i run into this.

unmounting CDs in order to eject them is one. having more volumes on the desktop than free space on the desktop is another.

[Metrophage]

In my SCSI tower days, I used a utility IIRC called "Mount Everything." But my memory is sketchy, I couldn't hazard a guess how/if it could handle SATA.

[IIO]

it seems like firewire in OS9 simply lacks the proper commands for setting disks to sleep.

while OSX puts external disks to sleep when you quit it, OS9 only unmounts them.

but what i dont undertand is that there are sleep modes during the operation of OS9, which can put external disks to sleep.