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Re: HD clicking

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Hi Mike and all,
I confirm that Load_Cycle_Count increase appears often on many laptops. Default HD parking settings are not well designed for Linux journaling file-systems, the HD being awaken frequently. The UL30A is affected, but all laptops that I tested with Ubuntu were also (some having the same "issue" with Windows).
Little precision : hdparm setting is lost on shutdown and must be set at each power on or wake from standby/hibernate. 

To avoid the Load_Cycle_Count increase, at least for Ubuntu flavors :
- System / Preferences / Power Manager, Battery tab, uncheck hard drive shutdown (that setting may not exist on older Ubuntu releases). - in directories /etc/pm/power.d and /etc/pm/sleep.d, create the same executable script named "99-hddfix" with following lines : 
#!/bin/sh
hdparm -B 254 -S 242 /dev/sda
These are extreme settings (254 may be replaced with lower value, -S 242 sets a one hour spin-off time), allowing Load_Cycle_Count to increase by only one for each powering (after power off or hibernate). I tested these values on several Asus, DELL, MSI and Sony laptops and netbooks (with different hard drives manufacturers/models).
Possible drawbacks : hard drive temperature increase, more power consumption, but I did not notice much difference since ext3 and ext4 cause HD spinning very frequently (every 15 to 20 seconds with defaults settings).
My powertop consumption is 9,3W on average on the UL30A with these hdparm settings under Karmic Koala 64, reaching nearly 10 hours of battery power. 

Cheers,

      Philippe



my8192 a écrit :

I have a UL30-A2 running Karmic.

Has anyone else noticed that the HD clicks when on battery, and the
Load_Cycle_Count (using smartctl) increases around 4 times a minute, or more. 

I tried setting "hdparm -B 192", and this stops the clicking and
the increasing Load_Cycle_Count.

It seems that when on battery the HD (Seagate ST9320325AS) automatically
sets its APM mode to 128, which causes the HD's heads to park/unpark.
On a separate topic, I've enabled laptop-mode, and have reduced my battery 
power usage from around 10.1W to 7.6W (based on values from powertop).
I now have over over 10 hours of real notebook use when on batteries.

Mike
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