Fedora May Be Killing Your Laptop's Hard Drive?

[Guy Fraser]

On Thu, 2007-11-01 at 02:00 +1030, Tim wrote:
> Tim:
> >> The head's cycled a around 500 times since three hours and forty-five
> >> minutes ago, and it's been running off mains power (so not battery save
> >> features should have been doing their thing).
> 
> Alan Cox:
> > If you want to change your drive behaviour from the vendor supplied
> > defaults see "man hdparm"
> 
> I have.  But what you have is an abstract range of numbers which apply
> some sort of power management, but without any definition of what those
> numbers mean, other than more or less power management.  You don't get
> something like - if the drive has been idle for five minutes, or X
> seconds, you can get the drive to park the head.
> 

Isn't that the Manufacturers responsibility to provide those details?

> If you did, it'd be easy to set the drive to be kept awake by at least
> the minimum time period that something happened on Fedora (e.g. if it
> reads configuration files, or writes logs, once every two minutes, you'd
> make the drive stay awake unless left idle for 5 minutes, and not have
> the thing going on and off like a pendulum clock with a very slow
> period).
> 
> -- 
> (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.