Hi,

GNOME has an option "Spin down hard disks when possible"; is it ever possible? I'm using a netbook so I only have one drive and the operating system is on it. Is the operating system ever idle for more than a few seconds? If I spin down my SATA drive with sdparm it spins back up immediately.

It's a 320GB 7200RPM drive; just wondering if I could save some battery life.

Thanks

Probably not possible with only one drive.
It would some work to find out, but I think that some primary directories are under constant access (like the root /usr /etc), and the swap partition may never be allowed to spin down. This is only good if you have the user space on another drive or if the system resided in a ram drive. I think some experiments were done some years back, but I do not know what the results were, but I think it was not good. Most of the system directories need to be on the root drive to even get through boot.