[ltp] to time the disk or not to ... that is the question ??

[Errikos Pitsos]

> How often do your disks turn off and on??
As little as possible because that is what kills the HD. I know that 
there are some people that have this on very low settings to conserve 
battery, but for me this never worked very well, as my systems swap, 
even with 1GB RAM, pretty often.

I have this set to 30 mins, which basically never happens.

Unfortunately I have already ruined 3 laptop HDs, just with normal usage 
and thus am very wary of abusing them too much, which I currently do 
anyhow using Gentoo as my distritbution(it's a source distribution). If 
you have an IBM HD, use hddtemp to check the HD temperature, I have 
reached 60C while compiling stuff like KDE. I think that the cooling of 
HDs in laptops still has loads of room for optimization.

Adding that they get frequent shocks etc and that my system is turned on 
about 18h a day, I really try not to stress the HD with additional 
powering on and off.

just my 2c.

erik