Re: AHCI power saving (was Re: Ten hours on X60s)

Alan
2006-11-13T16:09:22Z

On Mon, 13 Nov 2006 10:32:24 -0500
Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org> wrote:

> Therein lies a key problem. Turning on all of AHCI's aggressive power
> management features DOES save a lot of power. But at the same time, it
> shortens the life of your hard drive, particularly hard drives that are
> really PATA, but have a PATA<->SATA bridge glued on the drive to enable
> connection to SATA controllers.

We already detect PATA over SATA so we can trivially address that (the
knobble check). Similarly we can turn ALPME on using a timer so it kicks
in after long idle periods only, or tie it to laptop mode.

For a laptop type environment with SATA not bridged PATA turning it on is
clearly the right thing to do.

Alan