Hard drive keeps spinning down

diederick76 · 2011-10-29 12:18:16

One of the more annoying habits of my notebook is that the hard drive keeps spinning down all the time, resulting in the notebook appearing frozen for a second or two every time the hard drive is needed and clicking noises every few seconds. It is a dual boot machine: under Windows, it doesn't seem to do this.

To avoid this, I installed laptop mode tools and added it to my /etc/rc.conf, as suggested on the Wiki. I changed the default spin down value in /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf to 128. Then I added noatime and commit=600 to my /etc/fstab entries for /home and /. But nothing seems to work.

Is there anything more that I can do?

JokerBoy · 2011-10-29 12:45:45

hdparm -S 0 /dev/sda

how about this?

diederick76 · 2011-10-29 13:18:57

JokerBoy wrote:

hdparm -S 0 /dev/sda
how about this?

No effect. I can still hear the clicking sound every few seconds. Is there some tool around that I could use to diagnose this? With the journalling off, I would like to know what process is using the hard drive so often.

Last edited by diederick76 (2011-10-29 13:19:52)

JokerBoy · 2011-10-29 14:11:34

Try this also:

hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda

diederick76 · 2011-10-29 15:59:25

JokerBoy wrote:

Try this also:
hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda

I already tried 128 as a value, "manually" as well as via laptop mode tools, but that didn't work, and neither does this value :-(

elliott · 2011-10-29 21:50:36

I know Western Digital made some desktop hard drives that ignore the hdparm command to change the power management settings, I don't know if they made laptop drives like that too. I had to download a special DOS tool from WD to keep it from spinning down.

What is the model of your drive?

cinan · 2011-10-29 22:02:49

To turn off spinning down your HDD run 'hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda'. Works for me.
From 'man hdparm':

The highest degree of power management is attained with a setting of 1, and the highest I/O performance with a setting of 254. A value of 255 tells hdparm to disable Advanced Power Management altogether on the drive (not all drives support disabling it, but most do).

Last edited by cinan (2011-10-30 11:01:59)

diederick76 · 2011-10-30 12:50:56

elliott wrote:

I know Western Digital made some desktop hard drives that ignore the hdparm command to change the power management settings, I don't know if they made laptop drives like that too. I had to download a special DOS tool from WD to keep it from spinning down.
What is the model of your drive?

dmesg says its a WDC WD5000BPVT-80HXZT1. Google tells me that's a Western Digital drive, which is supposed to support APM. Did yours?

I kept the Windows partition. I'll look for that tool you mention. Can you tell me where you found it, or what is is called?

Last edited by diederick76 (2011-10-30 12:51:57)

elliott · 2011-10-30 14:25:17

The feature is called Intellipark. The tool I used was wdidle3.exe and is available from WD. Not sure if your drive has this feature or not.

student975 · 2011-10-30 15:51:05

elliott wrote:

The tool I used was wdidle3.exe and is available from WD.

How did you use the tool under Arch? Or - is it one-shot tool (i.e. it writes something somewhere into hdd once)?

elliott · 2011-10-30 16:09:13

student975 wrote:

elliott wrote:
The tool I used was wdidle3.exe and is available from WD.
How did you use the tool under Arch? Or - is it one-shot tool (i.e. it writes something somewhere into hdd once)?

It does something to the firmware, so it only needs to be done once. I used a DOS boot CD, can't remember if it was DR DOS, MS DOS or FreeDOS.

student975 · 2011-10-30 16:36:10

Ups... Sorry! Posting to wrong thread.

@moderator

Please, delete this message.

Last edited by student975 (2011-10-30 17:17:01)

Arch Linux

#1 2011-10-29 12:18:16

Hard drive keeps spinning down

#2 2011-10-29 12:45:45

Re: Hard drive keeps spinning down

#3 2011-10-29 13:18:57

Re: Hard drive keeps spinning down

#4 2011-10-29 14:11:34

Re: Hard drive keeps spinning down

#5 2011-10-29 15:59:25

Re: Hard drive keeps spinning down

#6 2011-10-29 21:50:36

Re: Hard drive keeps spinning down

#7 2011-10-29 22:02:49

Re: Hard drive keeps spinning down

#8 2011-10-30 12:50:56

Re: Hard drive keeps spinning down

#9 2011-10-30 14:25:17

Re: Hard drive keeps spinning down

#10 2011-10-30 15:51:05

Re: Hard drive keeps spinning down

#11 2011-10-30 16:09:13

Re: Hard drive keeps spinning down

#12 2011-10-30 16:36:10

Re: Hard drive keeps spinning down

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