My recently acquired Laptop made some strange noises several times a minute. With some help I was able to identify the hard disk power management as the source of the problem. This was easy to fix with some power management system scripts.
My recently bought new Laptophad had one problem: a strange noise bugged me. It came up several times a minute, even in idle mode. With some very helpful comments of some friendly readers (thanks Chris, Rui and Michael!) I was able to identify the hard disk as the main problem: the Load Cycle Count went up much too often per minute.
# smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep Load_Cycle_Count /dev/sda: ST9160821AS: 37°C 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 2330 # smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep Load_Cycle_Count /dev/sda: ST9160821AS: 37°C 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 2333 [...]
I went through the comments and through several bug reports and howtos to determine the best way to fix the issue: the fix should be easy, should work with suspend/resume and should be as native as possible, so should use the tools which are thought to be used for such cases.
The (for me) optimal solution was explained in the OpenSuse Wiki in the article “Disk Power Management”: a script is dropped at /etc/pm/config.d/disk which defines the parameters for the disk disk for the powersave mode and the normal mode. The explanation is easy to understand and does not use distribution-specific tools, so it should work on every distribution out there – it dead certainly work here at my Fedora machine.
The only question left now is if I should report my specific hard disk model anywhere to make sure that this problem is fixed automatically in the future.
April 25, 2008 at 22:15
I’m not sure it is actually a problem. I prefer to think that hardware manufacturers wouldn’t ship hardware that self desctruts
And the disk temperature does rise, in my case 5-6 C, which may actually be worse or not (according to a google paper[1]).
[1] http://sagecertification.org/events/fast07/tech/full_papers/pinheiro/pinheiro_html/index.html
April 29, 2008 at 3:23
Same problem on Ubuntu : I solved starting hdparm at boot with this hdparm.conf :
/dev/sda {
apm = 255
spindown_time = 0 }
So Disk Power Management is completely disabled , ’cause I can’t buy a new laptop HD every two years
Basically SuSE script does the same
May 5, 2008 at 7:19
[...] me for a while. There was a regular clicking noise. A search brought up a few mentions that it is a problem with Powersave and the hard drive trying to park too often. I found details of a script and after installing it [...]
May 8, 2008 at 18:18
I think you should. And thanks for sharing.