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

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

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?

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
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

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.".

Cu
knurd