[ltp] Head's up: new Lenovo BIOSes and HD APM (hdparm -B)

[David A. Desrosiers]

> Using -B 130 selects the Hitachi middle-ground power save, and -B 1 
> the highest level power save (which is an HD killer if your usage 
> pattern wakes the disk up often).

 	If you're doing regular backups, and the drive is still under 
the manufacturer's warrantee... why should you care? I'd much rather 
see better battery life out of my laptop, than worry about a drive 
dying a few months earlier than it should.

 	I regularly eat 2 drives per year in most of my laptops, and I 
treat them like 10,000 year old porcelain, but I back up often now. 
Most of the time the drives "Just Die(tm)", with no obvious symptoms 
behind it. The last one died because the drive arm physically detached 
inside and the drive was spinning for ~5 hours before I came home and 
realized it.

 	Oh the wonderful sounds that drive was making ;)

 	My hdparm lines look like this:

 	-A1 -a1024 -c1 -d1 -X69 -m16 -W1 -B10 -S4

 	Those get passed to hda and hdc (UltraBay hdd), and I've 
noticed quite a significant boost in battery life, and the laptop runs 
much, much cooler. Am I killing the drive prematurely? Maybe.. but 
they'll die long before the manufacturer's warrantee runs out, and 
I'll just send it in and get another one... like I always have.


David A. Desrosiers
desrod@gnu-designs.com
http://gnu-designs.com