Tim: >> The head's cycled a around 500 times since three hours and forty-five >> minutes ago, and it's been running off mains power (so not battery save >> features should have been doing their thing). Alan Cox: > If you want to change your drive behaviour from the vendor supplied > defaults see "man hdparm" I have. But what you have is an abstract range of numbers which apply some sort of power management, but without any definition of what those numbers mean, other than more or less power management. You don't get something like - if the drive has been idle for five minutes, or X seconds, you can get the drive to park the head. If you did, it'd be easy to set the drive to be kept awake by at least the minimum time period that something happened on Fedora (e.g. if it reads configuration files, or writes logs, once every two minutes, you'd make the drive stay awake unless left idle for 5 minutes, and not have the thing going on and off like a pendulum clock with a very slow period). -- (This computer runs FC7, my others run FC4, FC5 & FC6, in case that's important to the thread.) Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
