On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 15:08, Michael Towers <larch42@googlemail.com> wrote:
When I got a new laptop I investigated this problem a little and found that with hdparm -B 254/255 the temperature went up quite significantly. This may be a freak and I would love to know whether there really is something behind it, but when I used -B 200 the temperature increase was clearly smaller, but the load cycle count did not increase!!! Is this actually at all possible? Does the -B option do something other than only affecting head loading? Does anybody know?
In looking through the storage-fixup package data I see that always -B 254 or -B 255 is set, so obviously there is no sign of other, possibly more optimal values there.
Unfortunately there are not many ways to turn off head parking while not turning off power management. For WD drives there is a special DOS binary for that: wdidle3.exe which is provided by the support, but not allowed to be redistributed. You can easily find it on the internet though. Also I have seen some people doing tricks with sdparm, but I have not seen a reliable (non-specific to a particular HDD model) solution yet. -- Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)