Hi folks, I've got an Asus X7BJ-something laptop here that by default (i.e. when installing plain Gentoo on it) seems to do too aggressive power management for its hard drive. That is, already after only about five seconds(!!) of inactivity, the HDD spins down. This is kind of insane - you edit some small file, only half a minute later when you save it, you have to wait for what feels like ages for your HDD to spin back up and actually do something. ;-)
The first thing I tried was having a look at the BIOS to see if HDD power management can be disable there. But no sir, no such option. Ok, no problem I thought, and emerged "hdparm", which I have added to my default runlevel, so that it gets executed with the arguments "-B 254 -S 0" upon each boot. That seems to fix it, HDD power management is off and no more unwanted spindowns occur. However, now comes the problem: It seems that whenever I change from wall power to battery power (probably also vice versa, but I haven't tested this often enough), the machine's HDD forgets about the settings I've made using "hdparm" and starts spinning down right again after only a few seconds of inactivity. That sucks. Of course, manually executing "hdparm -B 254 -S 0 /dev/sda" after unplugging the machine fixes the issue again. However, something more "automated" would be prefered. First thing, I'm wondering if the change in power management parameters is actually caused by something at the OS level. I haven't set up any such thing explicitly, so I believe that it's something the machine just "does" outside of the OS's control. As it can be overridden by executing "hdparm" manually, what I would need is probably a place where I can hook in with a little shell script that gets executed every time the system's power source changes, and does nothing else than just execute "hdparm" with the appripriate parameters. So much about the theory, but then I don't really have an idea what I'd have to do to get a script to run every time the power source changes. And that's why I'm writing this message, as any suggestions that could point me into the right direction are very welcome. ;-) Greetings and thanks in advance, Nils -- Nils Holland * Ti Systems, Wunsorf-Luthe (Germany) Powered by GNU/Linux since 1998
