Frequent load cycles on battery (Gusty)

[peahen]

Recently I updated my T60 to Ubuntu 7.10 (gusty) from Feisty. A few problems emerged. One of them is that the hard drive spins up on a very frequent basis (almost every 30 secs or so) when switched to the battery power. This was not an issue before the upgrade though. I think it should the be related to the power saving default in the OS, but apparently this default is too aggressive that can potentially shorten the life time of hard disk. Is there any way to lower the load cycle frequency? Thanks

[aaa]

By default it should not change going from AC to battery.

Did you enable laptop-mode or such? laptop-mode changes the settings when going on battery, and if you are using it you would modify /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf to change things like when the disk should spin down. However, it usually is disabled by default.

The way I do it is:
install & enable laptop-mode (usually isn't there to begin with)
keep aggressive settings on battery that laptop-mode has
laptop-mode also minimizes disk access (to avoid extra spin-ups)
disable disk cache on Firefox so it doesn't spin up the disk
That way, the disk only spins up every few minutes, which saves alot of battery power (+10% relative to my laptop).

And the very short term solution is to run:
sudo hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda
sudo hdparm -S 255 /dev/sda
Which would disable spin downs totally, at least until whatever messed with the settings does it again.

[peahen]

Thanks.

By default it should not change going from AC to battery.

Did you enable laptop-mode or such? laptop-mode changes the settings when going on battery, and if you are using it you would modify /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf to change things like when the disk should spin down. However, it usually is disabled by default.

The way I do it is:
install & enable laptop-mode (usually isn't there to begin with)
keep aggressive settings on battery that laptop-mode has
laptop-mode also minimizes disk access (to avoid extra spin-ups)
disable disk cache on Firefox so it doesn't spin up the disk
That way, the disk only spins up every few minutes, which saves alot of battery power (+10% relative to my laptop).

And the very short term solution is to run:
sudo hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda
sudo hdparm -S 255 /dev/sda
Which would disable spin downs totally, at least until whatever messed with the settings does it again.