Arch Linux

basilgor

Member

Registered: 2010-04-11

Posts: 1

pm-utils-1.4.0-1: aggressive hard drive power saving (often spin-up)

[sorry, misplaced post. this issue is for package from extra repo]

Hi all,
after upgrading from pm-utils-1.3.0-2 to pm-utils-1.4.0-1 I noticed that hard drive on my laptop is stopped and spinned up again too often.
The reason for this is script introduced in pm-utils-1.4 /usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/harddrive that activates aggressive power saving. pm-powersafe is triggered after suspend wake-up in my case.

I noticed that

# hdparm -B /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
 APM_level    = 1

in case when laptop runs on battery power, and

 APM_level    = 254

when on AC. And I'm rarely use AC

Positive effect of this aggressive hard drive power saving is really doubtful as it can shorten your hard drive life significantly and cause apps hung till spin up very often.
I don't want to bring up a big discussion here, almost the same problem was discussed by ubuntu community
"Ubuntu's Laptop Killing Bug":
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=0 … 4&from=rss

Currently I manually disabled power saving on hard drive by

# hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
 setting Advanced Power Management level to disabled
 APM_level    = off

and disabled /ur/lib/pm-utils/power.d/harddrive by resetting execution flag.

I monitored spin up cycles count by

# smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep Start_Stop_Count
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       4715

It grew significantly before I noticed the problem

Last edited by basilgor (2010-07-23 12:36:32)

korpenkraxar

Member

Registered: 2006-04-02

Posts: 123

Re: pm-utils-1.4.0-1: aggressive hard drive power saving (often spin-up)

Yeah this happen on my Thinkpad as well in Arch. The only reliable method I have found to deal with it is to install laptop-mode-tools and enforce more or less the same harddrive policy for running on either battery or AC. Check the (sparse) info in the wiki: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Laptop_Mode_Tools . The package itself is in [extra].

EVRAMP

Member

From: Czech Republic

Registered: 2008-10-03

Posts: 173

Website

Re: pm-utils-1.4.0-1: aggressive hard drive power saving (often spin-up)

I have

hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda

in /etc/rc.local to apply this after boot and

#!/bin/sh
# Use a less aggressiv hard disk power management in order to  get 
# rid of clicking noise which occurs when the drive is parking its heads

. "${PM_FUNCTIONS}"

case "$1" in
        thaw|resume) 
                hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda
                ;;
        *)
                ;;
esac

exit $NA

in /etc/pm/sleep.d/00-hdd to apply it after resume from suspend, but when resuming APM is not set since recent version of pm-utils

Last edited by EVRAMP (2010-08-06 10:30:58)

redskolnikow

Member

Registered: 2010-08-15

Posts: 8

Re: pm-utils-1.4.0-1: aggressive hard drive power saving (often spin-up)

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=102919

I use

touch /etc/pm/sleep.d/harddisk

too.
Then you can control hard disk's APM by your own, f.e. hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda in rc.local