[ubuntu-uk] Launchpad and the Slashdot effect

[Darren Mansell]

Dougie Richardson wrote:
> Hi Alan,
>
> On Tue, 2007-10-30 at 16:34 -0400, Alan Pope wrote:
>   
>> Which has been all over planet ubuntu for about a week or so. Slashdot
>> is quite behind on this topic.
>>     
>
> Slashdot has a much wider audience, many of whom are anti-Linux, in fact
> many who are anti-Ubuntu. My concern isn't the bug, in fact I've seen
> all the links you gave. Actually I have even worked it out and blogged
> about it in my case (http://blog.lynxworks.eu) in preparation for posts
> appearing in the forums. I have to say that I don't think it's an issue,
> as I'm inclined to be more concerned about start/stop cycles.
>
> I understand the issue, I just wanted to draw attention to what could
> possibly have much mileage made of it by those who seek to spread FUD.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Dougie
>
>
>   
I am actually slightly concerned by this. I bought a new drive for my 
laptop a while ago and because of the continual clicking I told the 
vendor it was faulty. Never got round to sending it back but bought 
another one. Same thing with this one. So I read a bit about laptop-mode 
and thought its obviously a new kernel feature or something that saves 
power and its normal to click.

I've gotten used to the clicking so I don't hear it any more. Until 
reading the various blogs and stuff I realised it is clicking every few 
seconds. So I disabled power management on the drive by using hdparm -B 
255 /dev/sda and the clickings gone...

Sometimes when I'm watching a video streaming over my network I hear the 
drive just turn off completely and the laptop is silent. That made me 
think everything was fine as the drive doesn't get used when its just 
streaming stuff.

So am I right in thinking the load cycle has been pre-set by Maxtor (the 
drive manufacturer) and that the main problem is that something in 
Ubuntu is waking it a bit too often? My LoadCycle equates to 71 per hour 
which is over 1 per minute. Nothing major to worry about but the 
clicking is bugging me again. I've set the drive back to 1 for APM and 
the clicking is about what it was before.