maor:
Yes my computer came with an OEM install (it's an ASUS F3Sc with a preinstalled
Windows Vista Home Premium, which I deleted now, so I will not be able to test
it anymore). I cannot exclude your suggestion (namely that ASUS could have used
a special tweak).
I used smartctl both under
maor:
In fact, I started by monitoring the load/unload parameter using hdparm
with Gutsy as well as with Vista. Then I noticed that there was indeed a
click each time the counter was increased. So at least on my computer,
I can tell you when the counter goes up just by listening to the
harddrive
Mathieu:
In fact 255 is not a legal value for APM. The ATA/ATAPI spec states clearly
that 255 is reserved. The APM parameter only accepts values up to 254, so
hdparm will never read out 255 as a value for APM. However hdparm accepts -B
255, and in such case, it will send a disable APM command
Looking at hdparm's code, we can see that the value of 255 will NOT be
sent to the harddrive, but it will send the disable APM(0x85) command
instead of set APM to xxx (0x05).
if (apmmode==255) {
/* disable Advanced Power Management */
args[2] = 0x85; /* feature register */
if
