Laptop hard drive spindown timeout

[Kevin Oberman]

> Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2003 13:40:53 -0800 (PST)
> From: Nate Clark <nwc at jope.net>
> Sender: owner-freebsd-mobile at freebsd.org
> 
> I'm surprised at how well 5.1-RELEASE is working on my IBM
> Thinkpad 600X, with the exception of one annoying problem.  When I'm
> running from batteries, the hard drive spins down every second or so.  Of
> course this is usually followed by some disk activity requiring it to spin
> up again.  So my drive is in a constant state of spin down/spin up.  All
> I can think of is how much this is shortening the life of my drive.  This
> doesn't happen when on the AC adaptor.  Needless to say, I never run on
> batteries, which kinda defeats the purpose of having a laptop.
> I'm not using APM or ACPI, although my troubleshooting with these enabled
> has had no effect so far.  Any ideas about how to fix this?  I don't mind
> doing a little kernel or device driver hacking if need be. Actually, I'd
> enjoy it, just don't know where to begin.

Take a look at your BIOS configuration. The disk spin-down timer is
configurable by power profile, but I am uncertain which profile is
used when neither ACPI nor APM is in use. Use the ps2 DOS utility to
examine and adjust the parameters. The ThinkPad Configuration utility
will not normally make changes that are preserved so they work on BSD.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634