[NBLUG/talk] HDD spins up on disk read and immediately spins back down - Debian Sid

[Kyle Rankin]

On Fri, Jun 24, 2005 at 09:39:50AM -0700, A.C. wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> I'm mostly pinging the group about this one because of how strange it 
> is.  I've got a Debian unstable system (installed from Kanotix 2005-02) 
> and for some strange reason, the hard drive keeps spinning down as soon 
> as any read or write attempts are complete.  In other words, when using 
> the system, if I attempt to open or write to a file, I can hear the hard 
> drive spin up, complete the read or write operation, and then 
> immediately spin back down.  Doing an apt-get update is particularly 
> fun/noisy.
> 
> I can't imagine this is by design, and I'm fairly certain it's only 
> reducing the drive's longevity.  I've attempted to boot with noacpi set, 
> but this didn't make much of a difference.  I don't see anything in 
> KDE's power control tab that looks useful, and stopping laptop_mode 
> didn't help either.  My system configuration is:
> 
> Asus A7N8X nForce 2 chipset motherboard
> AMD Athalon XP 3000+ (2.2 GHz) proc
> 512 MB RAM
> 80 GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 ATA/133 hard drive
> 
> Does anyone have a suggestion about where to proceed next?  I see lots 
> of stuff from wandering around Google about enabling spin-down modes for 
> laptops, but nothing that quite addresses this problem.  Any assistance 
> would be appreciated.  Thanks in advance,
> 
> A.C.
> ******
> 
> 

In addition to laptop-mode, there's a chance that Kanotix included other
hdparm tweaks (or possibly boot-time kernel arguments) that control how
quickly the hard drive spins down. I'd check the lilo/grub boot-time
parameters and look for some sort of /etc/init.d/hdparm script as well.

-- 
Kyle Rankin
NBLUG President
The North Bay Linux Users Group
http://nblug.org
IRC: greenfly at irc.freenode.net #nblug 
kyle at nblug.org