Re: Laptop's HDD

[Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org>]

Maciej W. Rozycki wrote:
> On Sun, 4 Nov 2007, Alberto Gonzalez wrote:
> 
>> The problem comes from a very high rate of load/unload cycles of the heads 
>> that reaches the 300.000-600.000 limit in 2-3 years (with smartmontools it 
>> can checked it with "smartctl -A /dev/sda")  . There are reports of HDD dying 
>> even earlier for this problem [2]
> 
>  I use:
> 
> # hdparm -B 255 /dev/hda
> 
> to get rid of the problem with an ATA disk where I do not care that much 
> about power consumption.  I do not know what the equivalent for a SATA 
> disk would be, but chances are it will be easier to track it down with the 
> reference above.

Although other power management features exist for SATA, for most hdparm 
stuff PATA and SATA are pretty much the same.  Same command set, simply 
a new bus over which to transmit the commands.  A great deal of early 
SATA is actually bridged PATA, even.

	Jeff