hdparm -B for netbooks

[Richard Zidlicky]

On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 05:08:58AM +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > Yes - it's an option that's basically impossible to expose in a UI in a
> > sensible way.
> 
> How so? "Spindown timeout", "Advanced power management timeout", and a 
> slider with 256 entries (or 240 or whatever the number of non-weird ones is) 
> looks quite sensible to me.

spindown does not appear to have been the problem so far, or very infrequently,
that does not mean it would be wrong to add that as well.

As of APM it is 0-254 entries, 255 is reporteldy reserved for something else. 
The interpretion of the entries across different drives makes it ugly - some 
reportedly don't react to values over 200 while some need 254 to avoid frequent
head clicks.

So for that interface I would suggest a "enter value if you think you are smart"
box, slider would be too misleading. 

I think that would be still helpfull for a lot of folks who can read forums but 
find it hard to figure out if it was /etc/hdparm.conf, /ets/syconfig/harddisks
or whatever else that should be changed in a particular distro. Previous time 
I have done it it took me 3 reboots and several suspend/wake cycles to get it
to the right places, that was before it was restored after suspend.

Richard