Fedora May Be Killing Your Laptop's Hard Drive?

Tim ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au
Thu Nov 1 17:42:42 UTC 2007


Tim:
>> not applicable to a drive as part of a computer system.  Manufacturers
>> may well preset a drive to go to sleep / be protective, fairly soon,
>> expecting computer OSs to configure the drive to best fit into the OS's
>> usual manner of using drives.  Some computer OSs (or, more to the point,
>> their configurations), do actually set the drive differently than the
>> defaults.

Alan Cox:
> No. The ATA philosophy is pretty much "don't break DOS". DOS and Windows
> 95/98 don't know this stuff so you can't assume the OS will touch it.

I don't think that rapidly head parking drives would upset them, those
OSs don't keep poking at files on the drive all the time, like Linux
does.  Well, not in my experience.

>> deliberately using it) at boot time, or have a SMART daemon
>> configuration that throws up a warning about there being a very large
>> number of head parks within a short time period, the same as you get
>> warnings about read errors, etc., prompting users to reconfigure the
>> settings themselves, as best suited their own needs.

> Not a bad idea at all - file bug/send patches.

I'm not familiar enough with it to do that, but I thought I'd see (on
here) whether the idea had any merit.  I've had a bit of a look at the
smartd.conf man file, and I think I can see the direction of how to go
about it, but I'll need to think about it a bit more.

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

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.
I read messages from the public lists.




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