Pm-utils-1.4.0-1: aggressive hard drive power saving (often spin-up)

Question

[sorry, misplaced post. this issue is for package from extra repo]
Hi all,
after upgrading from pm-utils-1.3.0-2 to pm-utils-1.4.0-1 I noticed that hard drive on my laptop is stopped and spinned up again too often.
The reason for this is script introduced in pm-utils-1.4 /usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/harddrive that activates aggressive power saving. pm-powersafe is triggered after suspend wake-up in my case.
I noticed that
# hdparm -B /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
APM_level = 1
in case when laptop runs on battery power, and
APM_level = 254
when on AC. And I'm rarely use AC
Positive effect of this aggressive hard drive power saving is really doubtful as it can shorten your hard drive life significantly and cause apps hung till spin up very often.
I don't want to bring up a big discussion here, almost the same problem was discussed by ubuntu community
"Ubuntu's Laptop Killing Bug":
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=0 … 4&from=rss
Currently I manually disabled power saving on hard drive by
# hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
setting Advanced Power Management level to disabled
APM_level = off
and disabled /ur/lib/pm-utils/power.d/harddrive by resetting execution flag.
I monitored spin up cycles count by
# smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep Start_Stop_Count
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 4715
It grew significantly before I noticed the problem
Last edited by basilgor (2010-07-23 12:36:32)

Answer 1

I have
hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda
in /etc/rc.local to apply this after boot and
#!/bin/sh
# Use a less aggressiv hard disk power management in order to get
# rid of clicking noise which occurs when the drive is parking its heads
. "${PM_FUNCTIONS}"
case "$1" in
thaw|resume)
hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda
esac
exit $NA
in /etc/pm/sleep.d/00-hdd to apply it after resume from suspend, but when resuming APM is not set since recent version of pm-utils
Last edited by EVRAMP (2010-08-06 10:30:58)