Best way to shutdown a 386/486 ?

Reply 20 of 23, by Errius

Posted on 2019-10-07, 14:26

Errius Offline

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jmarsh wrote:
Early drives should always be parked to avoid the heads landing on the usable areas of the platters.
Later drives (pretty much IDE onwards) auto-park when powered off.

Surely the heads float in the air when the unit is powered off? It's only when the drive is moved that you run the risk of them crashing into the platters.

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Reply 21 of 23, by jmarsh

Posted on 2019-10-07, 14:48

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Errius wrote:
Surely the heads float in the air when the unit is powered off? It's only when the drive is moved that you run the risk of them crashing into the platters.

The heads are spring loaded to be pushed towards the platters, they only float due to air passing between them and the surface. When it stops spinning they make contact.

Reply 22 of 23, by HanJammer

Posted on 2019-10-07, 16:27

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Once you see no drive activity - use power button and that's all. HDD LED is there for a purpose you know...
I never damaged filesystem on the harddrive even with big smartdrive buffer by turning off the computer - but I always did it like that.

If you want to move the machine around and it has MFM hard drive it's a good idea to park it first using park.com or similar program which will tell you when the drive is parked and you can turn of machine then.

Also - if you use XT-IDE with some more recent HDD or CF card - it may not be necessary to enable smartdrive at all because performance gains will be next to none (but it has to be tested in each configuration).

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Reply 23 of 23, by Intel486dx33

Posted on 2019-10-07, 18:37

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HanJammer wrote:
Once you see no drive activity - use power button and that's all. HDD LED is there for a purpose you know... I never damaged fil […]
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Once you see no drive activity - use power button and that's all. HDD LED is there for a purpose you know...
I never damaged filesystem on the harddrive even with big smartdrive buffer by turning off the computer - but I always did it like that.

If you want to move the machine around and it has MFM hard drive it's a good idea to park it first using park.com or similar program which will tell you when the drive is parked and you can turn of machine then.

Also - if you use XT-IDE with some more recent HDD or CF card - it may not be necessary to enable smartdrive at all because performance gains will be next to none (but it has to be tested in each configuration).

Does anyone have a batch file to flush the ram and cache and park the hard drive ?
Can you post it please ?

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