Comment 51 for bug 59695
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| Kamil Páral (kamil.paral) wrote Re: default value in power.sh potentially kills laptop disks | #51 |
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0e1f616
(Get the code!)
Matthew Garrett is right, it seems NOT to be an Ubuntu issue. I managed to get the *same* behaviour under GRUB. In BIOS or GRUB, the harddisk makes "the click" only once, after that it's silent. That's because noone is accessing the drive anymore. But in GRUB, you can browse the filesystem. So if I list some directory, the harddisk audibly "loads" and after a few seconds again "unloads". The difference is, under Ubuntu, someone is always accessing the disk, therefore it unloads/loads constantly over and over again. Windows must automatically set the APM values to another values right after boot (or they might not be accessing/probing the disk all the time, even when idle).
Therefore, the values which everyone complains about are really set from the manufacturer. The question is if it's wrong. Some people may see that unloading disk after 20sec of inactivity is a good thing (less power(?), better security from fall). I can see that hdd manufacturers can set this settings intentionally. The problem is that linux does not allow the disk to stay in the unload mode for even a second. Maybe the culprit is kernel or some program running in the background constantly probing all devices. IF the harddisk stayed unloaded until some read/write activity is needed, all this would be good behaviour.
So there are two problems:
1. Ubuntu is touching the disk all the time. The culprit must be found (e.g. some logging daemons) and the behaviour has to be fixed to be more appropriate for desktop/laptop users. Not only it would extend harddisk life but also extend battery-time on laptops.
2. Until previous bug is fixed, Ubuntu should check for this kind of APM values and tweak them a little bit not to destroy the harddisk in a few months. This is clearly a linux problem (the disk should stay unloaded for some time and it doesn't) so Ubuntu should provide some patch to save customers disks until the whole linux-harddisk-
For those who didn't read carefully I sum up: The problem is not in the APM and disk unloading quickly, the problem is in the disk loading up right after unloading.