hdparm -B for netbooks

[Richard Zidlicky]

On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 10:09:39PM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 09:34:54PM +0100, Richard Zidlicky wrote:
> 
> > it was my understanding that "hdparm -B" has nothing to do with the BIOS but changes 
> > the power management feature specific to the drive?
> 
> Either the drive set the initial value, or the BIOS did. We tend to 
> assume that there was some reason for that...

the reason is not always reasonable. Maybe the BIOS programmer assumed a specially
tuned distribution which never materialised. Maybe some manufacturer wanted to impress
with better runtimes on battery and did not care if the harddisk is broken after 
2 years.

Whatever the reason, many users think it is better to change the setting - is there
any reason why the power manager should not make it really easy?

I did read that various a few drives have a special interpretation of the numeric
values but I do not see a problem if the sysadmin chooses the value and have never
heard of any serious saftey problems.

Richard