Hard disk power management

[Richard Hughes]

On Sun, 2006-12-17 at 12:17 +0530, kitts wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I use a laptop and i find that the portion of it which gets the hottest is 
> the hard disk even when in idle state. Still i don't find any power 
> management feature to control the power supply to the disk.
> 
> Have i over looked it? or is it in the roadmap?

I suggested a patch on the mailing list[1] some time ago, but Danny
pointed out that we wouldn't actually save much power anyway. Is there
any way you could profile the power you would save using hdparm? If you
have gnome-power-manager installed you can just watch the discharge rate
in the profile graph.

My gut feeling is that with a modern hard-drive, it seems to save lots
of power by itself, without using hdparm. I would be interested to be
proved wrong. :-)

Richard.

[1] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/2005-August/003116.html