excessive hard drive parking

since changing xfce4 acer version to unlocked fedora version I have the dreaded excessive hard drive parking issue, so far fedora/ubuntu doc's haven't cured it

 

Its completely configurable with the hdparm utility. The drive can be forced to stay on or have much longer timeouts.

localhost dattaway # hdparm -S 200 /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
setting standby to 200 (16 minutes + 40 seconds)

 

thank you for your response, hdparm and smartmontools are installed I've followed your advice and the terminal accepts the command without error, unfortunately there is no improvement in head parking at a rate of 1-2 every 30 seconds

 

is there a way to stop excessive parking on a machine running xp?

 

You might try the "power management feature" as it has a setting to increase drive performance. Set performance to maximum at 254 and I'd guess it will forget about head parking:

Code:

       -B     Set Advanced Power Management feature, if the drive supports it.
              A  low  value means aggressive power management and a high value
              means better performance.  Possible settings range from values 1
              through 127 (which permit spin-down), and values 128 through 254
              (which do not permit spin-down).  The highest  degree  of  power
              management  is attained with a setting of 1, and the highest I/O
              performance with a setting of 254.  A value of 255 tells  hdparm
              to  disable  Advanced  Power  Management altogether on the drive
              (not all drives support disabling it, but most do).

 

Thank you for your help, one of the confusing things is that different distro's use different power management tools and locations of config files. that said I found

Code:

/sbin/hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda -S120

seems to have solved it, will be monitoring temperature of drive.

xfce4 power centre refuses to open, secondly has anyone tried using synaptic package manager and altering sources list to include more fedora packages :mrgreen:

 

To tackle this problem in windows XP:

I downloaded HD tune 2.55 and i just let it run in the background. Since that time i've never heard the start/stop sound until i shut down the system.