I'm trying to determine why hdparm wont keep my ide disk spinned down for more than a minute. i've also installed noflushd and followed all associated directions..........
ive started using windowmaker instead of kde (faster, less overhead, i was hoping kde was the problem..) and even gone to command line only mode (i forget what runlevel thats cALLED) and killed tasks 1 at a time.. i spent hours on this last night, no go.
i notice XFree86 logging is pretty regular. i went through my log startup files per noflushd docs i think it was: put a dash - infront of everything.
added noatime to my hdd in fstab. i cant find where to kill these other logs even temporarily to see whats what.
im using latest suse linux.
i have acpi turned off in bios, acpid installed (tried vise versa and everything inbetween), even trtied killing this last night too..
triwed with hdparm only and no noflushd, tried with noflushd and no hdparm but thats harder.. as i haver tyo wait for a minute..

anybody have any clue whats keeping it spinning?
i tried with the network cable unplugged also to determine if outside traffic was causing the issue..

im relatively unexperienced with linux so im not shooting in the dark but my flashlight in dimming.. dimming..
what happens as a test, i issue: hdparm -y /dev/hda
to spindown the drive (which works) but it starts back up at random intervals but within a minute usually..

any help appreciated ive spent many many hours on this.. i thjink my system has been using MORE power trying to spin up and down all the time

have you tried this setting......this sets the vendor defaults for the spin down time.

no i didnt.. ill try that. its an old 500mb notebook hdd.

i have been doing all these tests with acpi turned off in bios, or rather, set to allow the OS to handle.. perhaps with this setting ill experiment with turning disk spindown on in bios too with this setting. (if it doesnt work)

thanks. will try it and report