On my last two laptops and through 12.x and 13.x, I kept encountering the
issue with the HD making a clicking sound which shoves up the LOAD_CYCLE_COUNT and thus potentially dramatically shortens the lifetime of the HD. More detail and solutions can be found here:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...clicks-731882/

I've noticed that despite issuing hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda in rc.local, I still suffer from the problem sometimes and there seem to be two causes: 1) the laptop reverts to a value of 128 when resuming from standby; 2) it reverts to 128 when powersave mode is enabled, e.g. when removing mains power.

The solution to all of the above problems is to set the value for DRIVE_POWER_MGMT_BAT to 254 instead of 128 in /usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/harddrive or (my preference) to copy that file with that edit to /etc/pm/power.d/ (the latter file will then take precendence).

The downside is of course a shorter battery life, but given the reduction isn't much in my case, I certainly prefer that to a prematurely dead hard-drive!

So my question is: should a setting of 254 be the default in slackware?

The decision in Ubuntu seems to be to do so:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...ort/+bug/59695

Not that I'm advocating do as Ubuntu does - just pointing it out

Mine is clicky without that as well...

Thanks for the solution, I can't test it, but if it works it is a better solution than the one in the linked thread.

I just realized that although I checked for this problem when I first got my netbooks and it wasn't there, it seems that it is there now. Maybe I missed it or maybe something changed.

Putting 'hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda' in rc.local works for me no matter the power situation.

I recommend that the default be changed because it destroys HDDs faster than they normally would. If others want "power saving" HDD destroying features, they should enable it themselves.

ok, good to know I'm not alone. Thanks for the feedback.