Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (4570 mails)

[Christoph Thiel <cthiel@xxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 31 Oct 2005, Alistair Hamilton wrote:

> What laptop_mode does is cache lots of disc accesses so allowing the hdd 
> to spin down and thereby save battery.  This is certainly a risky thing 
> to do, since data can be lost.  However, many people believe that the 
> slight risk is worth the increased battery life.
> 
> My wee Dell X1 is almost silent (no fan and an inaudible hda) and it is 
> difficult to hear the disc. However, I think it runs all the time. The 
> battery life is much shorter in Linux than in Windows. Past laptops of 
> mine used other Linux distros that included laptop_mode, and enabling 
> it, so spinning down the disc, improved battery life considerably.
> 
> So, what I am missing is what laptop_mode does -- spin down the disc a 
> lot of the time by caching slightly dangerously.

Have you had a look at /etc/sysconfig/powersave/disk yet? It should have 
all the options that you are looking for.


Regards
	Christoph