make my laptop's hard drive spin down???
 

whenever i leave my old Gateway Solo 2500 on for 4 to 5 hours. It becomes very hot. I think there might be some problem with my fan. it only comes on for about 10 seconds when the laptop it's running hot.
don't know why, it does the same thing in window.
so i was wondering if there is anyway to spin down my hard drive to reduce some heat. maybe hdparm??
maybe there is some program out there that could make the fan spin as long as it's on??

To make your drive spin down:

hdparm -y /dev/device

If that seems to help, you might want to set your APM a bit more aggressively, so it will spin the drive down more often.

I have the same condition with a solo 9300.
I've always taken it for granted that the fan was always running
and would then speed up when things got too hot. (compiling)
It does get pretty hot, but I've left it on for up to 24 hours
and never had a problem.
I have just today upgraded to kernel 2.6.6 with acpi instead
of apm.
I'm taking it on a trip and will pay attention to see if acpi runs
it differently. I will post about it next week.