jasmineaura wrote:Well, perhaps not directly LMDE's fault, or even Linux, but.. it is a critical issue. Western Digital drives and the 8-second "IntelliPark" (or rather "StupiPark") issue. And though initially thought to affect the Scorpio Green drives, I've managed to confirm first hand that my ~1 week old laptop with Scorpio Blue 1TB drive is affected. And after a little research found several other Blues affected (recent, and same firmware version), and at least 1 other WD Scorpio Black affected!
I had to disable the feature on the drive's firmware using "idle3ctl" from "idle3tools" package (reverse-engineered from WD's wdidle3 DOS tool), to stop my drive from parking itself silly (it accumulated 3244 Load Cycle count in a few hours - tens of hours use, which was mostly on AC Power!). When I realized it, I was in LMDE, and after few minutes seeing it continuously rise, I immediately disabled it. Should've probably compared the Load Cycle increase rate to Win7 (since I'm dual-booting), but perhaps to be done later.
So for now, it'd be wise to keep an eye on this (critical) bug report on
hdparm, which have yet to be "quirked", at least for these drives and perhaps some Seagates (especially the Momentus drives):
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... bug/969165
Sorry to nag, but this is even more serious, related issue, as it has to do with frequent HDD spin-downs (Start_Stop_Count), which are typically limited to 50,000 for a drive's lifespan, unlike head parking (Load_Cycle_Count) which typically go from 600,000 to 800,000 or a million.
Bug 952556 on Ubuntu Precise & Quantual fixed hdparm frequent spin-down issue in hdparm_9.37-0ubuntu4.
Changelog:
hdparm (9.37-0ubuntu4) quantal; urgency=low
* debian/hdparm-functions, debian/95hdparm-apm: set our spindown policy
back to -B128 instead of -B127. Too many drives misbehave too badly
with this setting, possibly leading to drive failure. We should revisit
this once we understand why people's drives are spinning back *up* so
frequently. LP: #952556.
-- Steve Langasek <
steve.langasek@ubuntu.com> Mon, 30 Apr 2012 23:04:05 -0700
hdparm is
contradicting itself in /usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/95hdparm-apm (Using
LMDE+UP5, kernel 3.2+45, hdparm 9.39-1+b1)
The head of the file says:
# This script adjusts hard drive APM settings using hdparm. The hardware
# defaults (usually hdparm -B 127) cause excessive head load/unload cycles
# on many modern hard drives. We therefore set hdparm -B 254 while on AC
# power. On battery we set hdparm -B 127, because the head parking is
# very useful for shock protection.
It is obviously confusing -B 127 (which permits spin-down) with APM (-B 128) permitting PM (including head-parking) but not spin-down.
For instance, on my WD Scorpio Blue WD10JPVT, which had idle3 in its firmware modified from default 8sec to 180sec (3min) using `idle3ctl` (or wdidle3 in DOS!), I'm parking at an acceptable rate with the default PM level of 128, when on battery, without spin-downs, just as I wanted.
# hdparm -I /dev/sda | grep Advanced
Advanced power management level: 128
* Advanced Power Management feature set
# hdparm -I /dev/sda | grep -i standby
Standby timer values: spec'd by Standard, with device specific minimum
Shouldn't LMDE follow suit and change back to -B 128? Or should this be reported upstream (debian)?