bkpmind Just some notes

Using hdparm to solve noises from hard drive

That's old but can be useful for somebody.
When I installed last version of openSUSE (11.4) I started listen to strangers noises from my hard drive. It was like my hard drive got turned off several times per minute.

The solution I've found was use hdparm tool to configure the hard drive Power Management. I've set that way:

hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda

To make this permanent, I've put this command in /etc/rc.d/boot.local

Footnote 1: This never happen before with this laptop, even with other distros. I hope this doesn't happen in the next release.

Footnote 2: The following script help me to understand what was going on with my hard drive:

#!/bin/bash
lastval=0
while :
do
        newval=`smartctl -A /dev/sda | awk '$2=="Load_Cycle_Count" {print $10}'`
        if [[ $newval != $lastval ]]
        then
                date
                echo $newval
        fi
        lastval=$newval
        sleep 120
done