Arch Linux

j4ck4l

Member

Registered: 2011-12-14

Posts: 2

[Question] Weird Sound comming from my HD

Hi, im new at the forums. I came here to post about a problem that i have with my laptop.

My problem begins with Debian. Time ago i found that while im in battery and using laptop-mode-tools package a weird sound came from my HD. Then when i change to Archlinux that sound dissapear, but, i found that this 'sound' that came from my HD is the spindown and spinup of the disk. Then i found that using hdparm -S i was able to deactivate the spindown on my HD and that sound disapear.
My question is, Leaving spindowns activate  using 'hdparm -S 241 /dev/sda' will later kill my disk?. i've heard about systems killing disk because of the APM value setting on hdparm, but i dont have idea if this Spindown setting will do the same.

BTW, sorry for my bad english.

Last edited by j4ck4l (2011-12-14 04:20:39)

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,693

Re: [Question] Weird Sound comming from my HD

IMHO, Spin up and Spin down are hard on the disk.  I fully believe in keeping it spinning.  It is a bit more power hungry that way, but not so much so.

The thing that seems to kill disks are head load / unload cycles.  Some drives default settings, in conjunction with some Linux kernels, caused ridiculous numbers of head load cycles.

Fix that by setting the APM level to max.

ewaller@odin:~[22] 1007 %sudo hdparm -B /dev/sda 

/dev/sda:
 APM_level      = 254
ewaller@odin:~ 1008 %

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