Re: HD head unloads

Jan Engelhardt
2006-11-16T00:13:20Z

On Nov 15 2006 11:58, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
>On Nov 14 2006 13:06, Mark Lord wrote:
>> Jan Engelhardt wrote:
>>>
>>> Let me jump in here. Short info: Toshiba MK2003GAH 1.8" 20GB PATA
>>> harddisk, in a Sony Vaio U3 (x86, gray-blue PhoenixBIOS).
>>> If idle for more than 5 secs, unloads. Even when not inside any OS, which
>>> really sets me off.
>>> So I wrote a quick workaround hack for Linux, http://tinyurl.com/y3qs6g
>>> It reads a predefined amount of bytes (just as much to not cause slowdown
>>> yet still cause it to not unload) from the disk at fixed intervals.
>>
>> Thanks for the info.
>> Jan, in your specific case, can you not "fix it" properly with:
>>
>> hdparm -B255 /dev/?d?
>
>No not really. The unload threshold only raises up to about 15 seconds.

-B254 was more promising: unload timeout was like 2
minutes. What's more: upon every reboot, the power
management value is set back to 128.
I guess I'll stay with thkd.ko for more time.

-`J'
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