[ltp] Making hard drive stop when not in use

[Jeffrey L. Taylor]

Quoting Jay Strauss <me@heyjay.com>:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm running Debian/Sarge upon an A30 (2652 3CU).  I notice that the hard 
> drive never stops spinning.  Even when I leave it idle all night long.
> 
> Is there something, some package configuration, to make the machine 
> conserve energy (and not wear out my hard drive) when the laptop is not 
> being actively used for some specified period of time?
> 

The laptop kernel patches.  The laptop-mode-tools package is userland
pieces of this.  What you need to patch the kernel w/ Debian I am
unclear about.

Anyway, using the patches allows you to change the period of
cache/buffer flushes to something long like 30 minutes.  From the
documentation it is a fairly non-trivial process and puts your work at
risk.  I.e., you can lose 30 minutes of work in a crash.

HTH,
  Jeffrey