I could probably fix this if I could figure out how to Google the right phrase, but so far, no luck on that.

Hardware: Asus ROG w/i7-6gen, 16GB, 2GB nVidia, 17" FHD (The mechanical HDD was immediately replaced with an SSD when I got the laptop.
OS: LinuxMint 17.3 KDE 64 bit. (I cannot upgrade to 18.x b/c one of my most important applications will not work past 17.3.

Problem: when plugged in to the wall power, there is no problem! But when on battery, at or shortly after login the HDD light stays on solid, and I cannot do anything. It freezes up temporarily. Keep in mind that normally, this is a fast machine, but on battery, something kicks in on the HDD, and I simply have to wait until it's done to use the computer. It has done this as long as I can remember having the laptop (bought new, and immediately I installed LinuxMint on it. I disabled the swap partition a few weeks ago, but left it on the SSD. I've had this problem since the beginnning. Just haven't bothered to research it b/c I rarely used battery until lately.

Energy setting in System Settings look OK to me; I think I left them on default.
hdparm -B yields 254

If someone could give me a hint, I could probably look this one up and figure it out myself. Thanks.

Look in the BIOS settings for power profiles and check those to see what is different between the on mains and on battery settings.

No, such luck dave, there are NO power settings in my BIOS. Strange as it seems. I wish they would put all the settings there so we could fix it ourselves.

Almost sounds like suspend is kicking in.
Run iotop in batch mode with -o and write it to a file. Do your bit with the battery and check what was actually hitting the disk.
You haven't set up any filesystems to run as RAM resident have you ?.

serious?

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I would look into dmesg.

I would build my own kernel. i would look into special parameters on how often something is written to the disc. maybe tune2fs may help.

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you are talking about hdd was replaced with a SSD.

So has this box only SSD? Could be also bad firmware issue. I think about SAmsung and intel drives for example. I also have a SANDISK drive which performs very poorly in comparison with Plextor, adata, crucial.

Which file system are we talking about?

and are we talking about problematic kde and problematic systemd too? (which most likely is the case)

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and are the partitions properly aligned to 16MB sectors for your SSD?

Do Asus provide any utilities for that machine. Look for battery utilities as well a motherboard ones.

dave, Thanks, but all the utilities are Windows only. This laptop is Linux only.

roman, Hey, thanks a lot. That will keep me busy for a while. And hopefully, it will give me the answer. It is a crucial SSD, will apply new firmware from them. Yes, there is only the one SSD. No other HDD of any kind. It has an optical; I think there might be room for a small SSD, but I don't need or care to put one in. Yes, I seriously will not upgrade b/c one of my favorite and most used apps has not upgraded to work with newer versions of LinuxMint, though the programmer is working on it. Since it's the only KDE I know, and since Linuxmint uses systemd, I would say yes. Filesystem is ext4. Partitions all report being aligned via parted. Will work on the other stuff you suggested, and will have to self educate to do all that, but it will be good for me. Thanks again.

syg00, thanks, will try to do that, but it seems to take over the computer at login so that I cannot issue any commands or click on anything to start an application. I'll run it at startup to see what happens.

Try running Hiren tools and the pre-install Windows environment from there and see if they run under that. No Windows stuff is left behind. If you are that concerned about that corrupting your disk with MS stuff, you can even remove your hard drive first.

All my machines are laptops but I use them as desktops. The ones in use are always plugged in and left on.

There is a BSD powered variable for when they are plugged in and running on battery that may or may not be of some help, Linux guy that I am not.

It goes in /etc/rc.conf:


https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?powerd

Snap.....!!

Trihexagonal That might help; I'll look at it.

dave, I doubt the Hiren's will work b/c the drivers are all for Win10-64, and Hiren's is 32-bit Win2K. Also, this machine is my only machine, and I am on the road all the time, so I have to take whatever situation I can when I get wifi. Most times, I can find a plug-in, sometimes, not.

You could try older ones. Many of them tend to change the settings and save them so they may well still be set for other OSs

On the road or not you seem to be able to post here and you only need them once.
It seems to me that perhaps the makers of your machines are not supplying much needed control software for their machines.

On my personal lappy the HDD light stays lit always since I switched out the HDD for a SSD. It blinks during SSD use, but it never goes out.

And I noticed on an external enclosure with a SSD that the light does the same thing. So, I'm pretty sure it's something with the electrical characteristics of SSDs, not that the drive is actually in use more than with a HDD installed.

So it could be due to electrical characteristics that change on battery power.

dave, the drivers for this laptop are only Win10. It came out about 2 years ago, and I first tried to install Win 8.1 pro on it, but several things would not work because of no drivers.

AwesomeMachine, That's interesting, but my HDD light on my laptop does NOT stay on all the time. It is on/off just like a mechanical drive. My initial question did not make that clear. So I'll say it here. Normally under AC power, the HDD light only flashes intermittantly when the HDD is accessed. Otherwise, the light is off. But when on battery at and just after bootup, something is taking over the computer so that the HDD light stays on solid, and (I haven't checked this part, but) all 4 cores of the i7 are being used heavily.