Re: [gentoo-user] HDD with too aggressive power management

[Nils Holland]

On 08:38 Tue 01 Feb     , Iain Buchanan wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Mon, 2011-01-31 at 22:09 +0100, Nils Holland wrote:
>
> > However, now comes the problem: It seems that whenever I change from
> > wall power to battery power (probably also vice versa, but I haven't
> > tested this often enough), the machine's HDD forgets about the
> > settings I've made using "hdparm" and starts spinning down right again
> > after only a few seconds of inactivity. That sucks.
>
> frustrating indeed!  It could be a number of things: gnome, acpi, and/or
> bios making the changes automatically.
>
> My preference would be to fix it in acpid since it will work independent
> of the window manager or even X.
>
> emerge acpid, then edit /etc/acpi/default.sh similarly (sorry about the
> tabs/spaces):
>
> [...]

Hi Iain and everyone who replied,

thanks for all of your suggestions! In fact, I've noticed that GNOME
and other desktop environments seem to contain grephical interfaces
for setting the HDD to spin down automatically and already suspected
such a piece of software unwantedly being responsible for the behavior
I'm seeing. But I guess I can actually rule that out: I'm not using
any such desktop environment, but am actually using only the "awesome"
wm as my window manager. Furthermore, I don't use an X Display manager
but boot up in console-only mode and start X only when needed via
"startx". Therefore, I can rule out GNOME, KDE, etc. being
responsible, and as for the rest of the stuff I've installed, I've
choosen it rather carefully and certainly didn't installing anything
power-management-like.

I guess it's probably the way this machine "works", and feel that the
reference to acpid sounds like a very promising way to fixing this. As
such, thanks to everyone who pointed me into that direction - I'll
have a look and see if it works!

Greetings and thanks again,
Nils


-- 
Nils Holland * Ti Systems, Wunsorf-Luthe (Germany)
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