Laptop disk spindown

[Matthew D. Fuller]

On Sun, Sep 11, 2016 at 12:55:27PM -0400 I heard the voice of
Allan Jude, and lo! it spake thus:
> On 2016-09-11 12:50, George Mitchell wrote:
> > Smartctl reports that my laptop disk has started and stopped
> > 101,798 times in 2,027 hours of operation, or roughly once a
> > minute.  I imagine that saves wear and tear on the disk,

Actually, it dramatically _increases_ the wear and tear on the disk...

> This is controlled by the drive firmware, not the OS, however, you
> can often use camcontrol(8) to adjust it.
> 
> I don't have the exact command handy, sorry.

In /etc/rc.local on a system whose drives I once had to do this on,
I've got:

# Shut off APM on the drives to stop the load cycle count from blowing
# up.
# x-ref: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=9885
#for i in 0 2; do
#.  /sbin/camcontrol cmd ada${i} -a "EF 85 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00"
#done

(now, this is not a laptop, so "shut off APM" was a totally reasonable
hammer to swing here; whether there's something more nuanced that
would be preferable in the laptop case, I don't know)


-- 
Matthew Fuller     (MF4839)   |  fullermd at over-yonder.net
Systems/Network Administrator |  http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/
           On the Internet, nobody can hear you scream.