Fedora May Be Killing Your Laptop's Hard Drive?

Tim ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au
Thu Nov 1 15:05:23 UTC 2007


On Wed, 2007-10-31 at 11:01 +0000, Alan Cox wrote:
> Fedora does not touch those drive settings anywhere that I can find,
> and the kernel certainly does not. So we use the defaults set by
> either the BIOS or the drive when it powers up. 

I've read comments to that effect, elsewhere.  But I think it overlooks
a few things:  Those options may well be applicable to a drive that's
not being made use of (i.e. they're good *ignored* drive defaults), but
not applicable to a drive as part of a computer system.  Manufacturers
may well preset a drive to go to sleep / be protective, fairly soon,
expecting computer OSs to configure the drive to best fit into the OS's
usual manner of using drives.  Some computer OSs (or, more to the point,
their configurations), do actually set the drive differently than the
defaults.

It would seem prudent, to me, to either reset the drive with sensible
settings for how Fedora makes use of drives (bearing in mind how it will
repeatedly, and periodically, access drives, even when you're not
deliberately using it) at boot time, or have a SMART daemon
configuration that throws up a warning about there being a very large
number of head parks within a short time period, the same as you get
warnings about read errors, etc., prompting users to reconfigure the
settings themselves, as best suited their own needs.

-- 
(This computer runs FC7, my others run FC4, FC5 & FC6, in case that's
 important to the thread.)

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.
I read messages from the public lists.




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