Hard drive no longer spins down

[Ingenium]

I upgraded from 9.04 to 9.10, and I had my partitions formatted as ext4 with nodelalloc enabled since I had frequent kernel panics on 9.04 and was experiencing significant data loss. After upgrading, the hard drive would spin down when idle and on battery, just as it did in 9.04. However, after I removed the nodelalloc mount option, it no longer spins down. Shouldn't it be able to spin down more?

[khelben1979]

Maybe your system lacks hdparm?

sudo apt-get install hdparm

to install it and

man hdparm

for infomration on how to use it.

[wojox]

Could also try:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-laptop-mode

Laptop mode is a Linux kernel feature that allows the system to reduce power
consumption by allowing the hard drive to spin down for longer periods of
time. This package contains a script to control these kernel parameters.

[Ingenium]

hdparm is installed, as is laptop-mode. I have a custom laptop mode setup for a Thinkpad as per here http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Instal..._ThinkPad_T400

As I mentioned, it works if nodelalloc is used as a mount option.