ATAidle

As a software designed to manage the idle timer of ATA hard drives, ATAidle helps to put them in standby mode once the period of inactivity has expired. It is designed for users who run FreeBSD with ATAng, specifically FreeBSD 5.1 or newer, or Linux (tested with kernel 2.6.1, but any recent kernel should work). However, it is limited to detecting the first 8 ATA channels and can only work with i386 architectures.

Installation is quite easy, all you need to do is run "make" to build it and then "make install" to install the binary into /usr/local/sbin, with the man page going into /usr/local/man/man8. If you ever need to uninstall it, simply run "make uninstall". Alternatively, you can copy the binary to a more convenient directory.

Linux users may have to edit Makefile.Linux to set the compiler name as it is currently set to "gcc-3.3", which is a compiler that understands C99. This compiler version is not always available, so it may need to be changed to "gcc" and then run 'make'.

Usage is straightforward with the following options: -h (shows usage information), -l (lists installed devices), -I (sets the idle level spindown timer), -i (sets the drive into idle mode immediately), -S (sets the standby level spindown timer), -s (sets the drive into standby mode immediately), -A (sets the acoustic level, value between 128 and 254), and -P (sets the power management level, value between 1 and 254). Additionally, users would need to provide the channel and device numbers without any parameters to display information about the specified device.

All-in-all ATAidle is an excellent software for managing the idle timer of ATA hard drives, ensuring optimal performance and functionality.