FreeBSD is an awesome operating system, but if your machine is set up like mine… the drives spin all the time and can actually suck up some juice.
A month later, opening the electric bill made my eyes open wider than they usually do at a bill when I see the bigger bill.
Okay. I think we can solve this.
There’s a utility for spinning down the drives, named ataidle, and I found information about this nifty binary at http://www.cran.org.uk/bruce/software/ataidle.php.
It also happens to be installed in the ports directory: /usr/ports/sysutils/ataidle
So, if you want to save some green and go green too, check out this app and install it on your own FreeBSD machine.
The only thing about an utility like this is that certain programs, database programs for example, may be very sensitive to the drives spinning down for no apparent reason. So consider what programs are running on your system before you install this program.