hard disk power down (was: Re: PowerTOP tool released; time to fix the wasted laptop power on fedora?)

Jonathan Underwood jonathan.underwood at gmail.com
Mon May 14 09:37:34 UTC 2007


On 13/05/07, Richard Hughes <hughsient at gmail.com> wrote:
> Unless we keep the disk from spinning up, my patch isn't actually that
> effective. I am however using a similar patch to HAL on my media center
> embedded PC, where I'm only running a pretty stripped system, and spin
> the disks down mostly for noise, not power saving.
>
> My view still is that this is a valid patch to HAL, and I would be quite
> happy to do the action automatically in g-p-m. I'm not sure we need UI -
> we can probably just profile the mean time that the disk is idle and
> work out if it is worth powering down.
[snip]
> I think it is - we are trimming easy stuff (like cpufreq and brightness)
> and I think we need to start looking at the drive spindown with a new
> vigour.

There's another factor here though, as I understand it hard drive
lifetime is largely determined by the spin up/spin down frequency. So
while it may save a bit of power spinning down more often, this might
significantly shorten drive lifetimes. I'd definately want to have an
option to disable that, if my understanding is correct.

[However, my understanding is often incorrect]

Jonathan.




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