Arch Linux

chimerical_brio

Member

Registered: 2008-07-20

Posts: 38

Should I worry about power management load cycle destruction?

I can't say I know much about this, except that I've heard from multiple people that there's a problem involving HDD load cycles and laptop power management destroying the HDD, specifically on Ubuntu. is this something I should worry about? Thanks.

chimerical_brio

Member

Registered: 2008-07-20

Posts: 38

Re: Should I worry about power management load cycle destruction?

OK, I did some looking into this problem, and here's what I found...my load cycles were increasing by ~120/hour, and it seemed like that was a result of the APM setting on my hard drive being at 128. So I changed it to 254, and it seems to have stopped.

So I added "hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda" to /etc/rc.local. Will that workaround be sufficient? Will the increase in temperature be a problem?

Am I being specific enough? I'm kind of unsure if what I'm saying makes any sense.

bangkok_manouel

Member

From: indicates a starting point

Registered: 2005-02-07

Posts: 1,556

Re: Should I worry about power management load cycle destruction?

you may want to read this thread:
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=39258

chimerical_brio

Member

Registered: 2008-07-20

Posts: 38

Re: Should I worry about power management load cycle destruction?

I've been looking that over, and I think i'm going to look into laptop-mode-tools. Does anyone have any recommendations? Is running at 254 a bad idea? I saw something that the drive never spins down if it's like this. Should I care? I must admit I'm pretty ignorant on all of this.