[ltp] Re: Making hard drive stop when not in use

[Juergen Stuber]

Rob Browning <rlb@defaultvalue.org> writes:
> Juergen Stuber <juergen@jstuber.net> writes:
>>
>> it is very easy to configure so that it also spins down the harddisk
>> when on AC, I also do it to prevent the drives from wearing out.
>
> Hmm.  I'd gotten the impression that it was starts/stops (and head
> parks/unparks) that were the primary wear on the drive, not continuous
> spin.

I think for laptop drives that's not (no longer?) the case.

I normally have my laptop switched on continuously, so its drive
started giving me trouble after spinning continiously for about
a month, it failed with errors and a rather nasty noise and
I had to do a power cycle.  After that everything was fine,
until it happened again.

Then I looked at the specs, as for my next drive I wanted to buy
something suitable for continuous use, but I couldn't find any
(for an example spec see p25 of
http://sdd.toshiba.com/cda/localcache/820000001597000006f40000000100000000.pdf).

Then I turned off the machine for the night, but that is tedious
and makes backups more of a hassle.

So now I use laptop-mode.  I tried to limit starts and stops by
having a longer timeout (a few minutes instead of 20 seconds)
but that doesn't seem to work yet, and it seems still ok w.r.t. specs.


Jürgen

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Jürgen Stuber <juergen@jstuber.net>
http://www.jstuber.net/
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