acpi-support, laptop-mode-tools, and hdparm: when will the madness end?

[Sebastian Breier]

Am Samstag, den 28.06.2008, 14:21 -0400 schrieb Forest Bond:
> Not only does it clobber them, though, it overrides on-battery HDD APM settings
> (hdparm -B, hdparm -S) with some pretty aggressive settings that can, in fact,
> lead to people's hard drives dying early.  Users that think they are setting
> their HDD APM settings on the safe side (in /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf)
> have no idea that their drives are being worked pretty hard.  See #37187.

Hi,

I don't want to dismiss your arguments, I have the problem (in quite a
nonhazardous way though, my drive will only die in 3 years) myself.

I just want to mention two things that are most probably true:
1) Power saving is known to destroy hardware, not even hard drives;
That's known to technically inclined people.
Monitors, power supplies, fans, anything can break earlier if power
management interferes with it constantly, *especially* mechanical
hardware like hard drives.
2) Users who tweak their configs should know what they are doing.

=> Users who tweak power management settings should be aware they might
make things worse.

I'm not saying to leave this bug alone.
I'm only saying I'm much more worried about casual users who have the
problem since install, and don't know anything... and suddenly their
drive is trashed.

I myself was completely unaware of the bug some months ago, but I was
aware of my disk constantly clicking.
After some time, I did some research, and then the issue also crept up
on IT news sites.

To conclude: If people change a config setting "to be on the safe side",
they better check if their (load_cycle_count / power_on) ratio
decreases.
You can't change configs and assume all is right without checking. ;-)

Bye,
	Sebastian.
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