[NBLUG/talk] HDD spins up on disk read and immediately spins back down - Debian Sid

[thiessen at sonic.net]

> On Fri, Jun 24, 2005 at 09:39:50AM -0700, A.C. wrote:
>> Greetings,
>>
>> I'm mostly pinging the group about this one because of how strange it
>> is.  I've got a Debian unstable system (installed from Kanotix 2005-02)
>> and for some strange reason, the hard drive keeps spinning down as soon
>> as any read or write attempts are complete.  In other words, when using
>> the system, if I attempt to open or write to a file, I can hear the hard
>> drive spin up, complete the read or write operation, and then
>> immediately spin back down.  Doing an apt-get update is particularly
>> fun/noisy.

<snip>

>
> In addition to laptop-mode, there's a chance that Kanotix included other
> hdparm tweaks (or possibly boot-time kernel arguments) that control how
> quickly the hard drive spins down. I'd check the lilo/grub boot-time
> parameters and look for some sort of /etc/init.d/hdparm script as well.

See:

http://www.digit-life.com/articles/maxtor/
http://service.maxtor.com/rightnow/downloads/setacm.exe

Maybe the Accoustic Management mode is set to "quiet".

Justin Thiessen