Fedora May Be Killing Your Laptop's Hard Drive?

[Tim]

On Wed, 2007-10-31 at 17:10 +0000, Alan Cox wrote:
> Some drives have that, some don't. Most also honour the specific
> timeout setting via hdparm -S. (-S 0 being don't stop) 

Hmm, I didn't notice that option before, here's probably why:

       -s     Enable/disable  the power-on in standby feature, if supported by
              the drive. If enabled, the drive is powered-up  in  the  standby
              mode to allow the controller to sequence the spin-up of devices.
              This feature is usually disabled and the drive is powered-up  in
              the  active  mode  (see  -C  above).  Note that a drive may also
              allow to enable this feature by a jumper.  Some SATA drives sup-
              port  the  control  of  this feature by pin 11 of the SATA power
              connector. In these cases, this command may  be  unsupported  or
              may  have  no effect.  -S Set the standby (spindown) timeout for
              the drive.  This value is used by the  drive  to  determine  how
              long  to  wait  (with  no  disk activity) before turning off the
              spindle motor to save  power.   Under  such  circumstances,  the
              drive  may take as long as 30 seconds to respond to a subsequent
              disk access, though most drives are much quicker.  The  encoding
              of  the  timeout  value  is  somewhat peculiar.  A value of zero
              means "timeouts are disabled": the device will not automatically
              enter standby mode.  Values from 1 to 240 specify multiples of 5
              seconds, yielding timeouts from 5 seconds to 20 minutes.  Values
              from 241 to 251 specify from 1 to 11 units of 30 minutes, yield-
              ing timeouts from 30 minutes to 5.5 hours.  A value of 252  sig-
              nifies  a  timeout  of 21 minutes. A value of 253 sets a vendor-
              defined timeout period between 8 and 12 hours, and the value 254
              is  reserved.  255 is interpreted as 21 minutes plus 15 seconds.
              Note that some older drives may have very different  interpreta-
              tions of these values.

There's no "-S" option section, it's buried in the middle of "-s".  Is
your man file the same?

Though "spindown" is a different kettle of fish to just pulling the head
off to one side.  I heard mine doing that several times in just a few
seconds, earlier today.  No, it's not a drive with read errors, even
though that's *almost* the same sort of behaviour (the infamous click
whirr, click whirr).

-- 
(This computer runs FC7, my others run FC4, FC5 & FC6, in case that's
 important to the thread.)

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