laptop hard disk etiquette

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

On 27.10.2007 21:29, Alexander Boström wrote:
> fre 2007-10-26 klockan 17:26 +0200 skrev Thorsten Leemhuis:
> 
>> Additional note: the hard driver does strange noise (sounds a bit like
>> parking and unparking the heads maybe) now and then (sometimes every ten
>> seconds or so, sometimes a lot less). 
> 
> Oooohh... Yeah, this old Thinkpad T21 makes irritating noises like that
> too. And the Load_Cycle_Count increases every time it does that. (Disk
> model is IBM-DJSA-232.) Thanks for the explanation.

Hmmm -- Yesterday and today I tried to disable the Advanced Power
Management feature by using
# sudo /sbin/hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda

The strange noises I often heard every few seconds when the systems was
idle went away.

*Uneducated guess*: Dell (my notebook vendor) in the BIOS enabled the
Power Management feature (good) with a short idle-timeout (debatable if
that's good or bad (¹)) and expects that the OS set a more sane value
once the system is up (which we don't do, which I'd say would be the
correct way if those nosies wouldn't make me nervous).

CU
knurd

(¹) -- might be a good way to save power until the OS is up and running
to take care of it