f8 gripe #3: infamous Load_Cycle_Count started hitting my laptop, FAQ?

[Douglas McClendon]

Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> On 02.01.2008 08:38, Richard Hughes wrote:
>> On Tue, 2008-01-01 at 18:51 -0600, Douglas McClendon wrote:
>>> Quite simply, what is the prescribed way for me to run 'hdparm -B 254 
>>> /dev/sda' upon resume from suspend and hibernate?  (or a better
>>> solution 
>>> than that).
> 
> /me runs '/sbin/hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda' to disable PM for the hard disk
> completely, as the hard disk enters PM every few seconds otherwise and
> wakes up from it just a moment after
> 
>> Well, the standard solution is a pm-utils resume script, but why do you
>> need to run hdparm manually?
> 
> What about bootup?

bootup was the easy part for me (rc.local), I needed some help finding 
the right hooks for post-resume.

This is because, as I just verified, the setting is lost during 
pm-hibernate.

Why this didn't seem to hit me before f7->f8, I'm at a loss.


> 
> And what is about a real solution that "just works"? My current view on
> the whole problem is this:
> 
> 1. there are some laptops out there (including my Dell Latitude D630)
> that have a very aggressive default setting for hard disk power
> management set from the BIOS by default
> 2. the kernel doesn't touch the PM setting for the hard disk
> 3. Fedora doesn't touch the PM setting for the hard disk

Something changed in fedora and/or kernel within the last 6 months. 
When the ubuntu brouhaha flared up, I checked, and though seeing a high 
number (100,000), it was not increasing at an unreasonable rate.  I 
checked several times across a span of weeks.  All of a sudden after I 
upgraded to f8 (and with vista in between for a couple days) I ran into 
the issue, as described.

> 4. we don't care much about hard disk power management -- there are a
> lot of things written to disk (journal flushed, log files, ...) every
> few seconds
> 5. in combination with the aggressive BIOS default (one iirc can't
> modify in the BIOS Setup) that leads to a bad behavior, as the hard disk
> loads and unloads its heads very very often

Correct, on my vaio vgn-n250e, the bios has none of the typical 
workstation PM settings.  Dumbed down just the way I like it (really, 
until something like this happens)


> If the above is correct I'd say the best default for Fedora due to 4.
> and 1. (and it's effects in 5.) would be to disable hard disk power
> management completely by default if that doesn't do any hard to systems
> that don't fall in category "1.".

That sounds good to me for the timebeing.  Of course I used to have a 
different laptop with a noisy drive, which I liked to leave powered on, 
and somehow got set up so that it would actually be spun down 95% of the 
time when idle.  (so that it wouldn't drive me crazy when trying to 
sleep within earshot of it)

Sigh...  Maybe one answer is just wait for solid state to replace 
everything....

-dmc