Hard drive spindown

[Richard Hughes]

One of the more frequent requests I'm being sent (as the maintainer for
gnome-power-manager) is the option to spindown the hard-drive after
about an hour or so of inactivity. 

Now more power stuff have been accepted into HAL, and the script stuff
has settled down, what about the patch I proposed:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/2005-August/003107.html

Worth reading is Danny's email:
( http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/2005-August/003116.html )
about the spindown and spin-up real-world power savings of a typical
drive.
My laptop drives (nor my external USB2 drives) do not do their own PM,
and hence suck power when idle. 

Windows XP automatically spins them down after about an hour and a half
(by default).

I'm not wanting to spin them down after 5 minutes, just a checkbox for
"[x] Spin down hard disk drives after one hour of inactivity"

Or, does this functionality belong in the SetLowPowerMode script. Or,
should I leave this completely alone?

Richard.