Summary: Re: Spin down HDD after disk sync or before power off

[Dag-Erling Smørgrav]

Bruce Cran <bruce at cran.org.uk> writes:
> Do we think our users are silly enough to set a short timeout of just a
> few minutes?  I'd think most would use a setting of 20-30 minutes at
> a minimum. I never did understand why there were so many warnings;
> after all, some laptops even come with a default APM scheme in their
> HDDs that powers the disk down after 7 seconds!

Really?  That would make the system close to unusable, and the disk's
life expectancy would be reduced to a few months; a disk that performs
two load / unload cycles per minute on average will need replacing after
three to six months.  Remember, there was a huge flap a couple of years
when Ubuntu shipped with a default timeout of 90 seconds, which is more
than ten times more than what you suggest.

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des at des.no