Comment 695 for bug 59695

For those of us with crazy drives like mine that park whenever APM times out no matter what, I have a possible partial solution.

It seems that what is happening is that the drive's timeout for parking the heads is shorter than the interval at which ubuntu syncs the filesystem to disk. This means that any kind of filesystem activity (such as regular touches or a big download) are insufficient to keep the heads from parking.

However, smartctl talks directly to the disk itself. From experimenting this afternoon, calling smartctl -a every 15 seconds keeps the disk awake. This did cause the disk to heat up to 42c, which is 3 or 4 degrees hotter than it normally runs.

I wrote a script with an infinite while loop to keep calling smartctl every 15 seconds. Unfortunately this script causes my system to hang if it is running when I shutdown. I am pretty noob at scripting. Maybe someone with more script-fu could contact me privately to help iron out this problem?