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Hard Disk spindown


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Hi all,

 

I know that I typically post questions to this thread and like a lot of laptop questions, they may/may not come back answered.

 

On my Dell Latitude D620, suspend to RAM works well....except one little detail. When I suspend to RAM all seems to actually suspend except for a VERY VERY faint whine which I am presuming is the sound of a hard disk in activity. (I know, I know that what I'm about to say is frowned upon by some.) When I suspend to RAM in M$ I do not get this same whine. I've tried setting the BIOS settings to quiet. I've used hdparm to set my hard disk to the "silent mode". No luck. Am I missing something. I mean evreything seems to work. DPMS and all. Could this be the sound of active RAM? Surely not.

 

Any ideas? If there is already a thread which I missed in my searches which covers this topic, feel free to point me there.

 

Thanks,

 

Jon

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in a shell, do hdparm -y /dev/xdx where xdx is your hdd, be it hda, sda or whatever. Does the whine dissappear before it spins back up (you should be able to clearly hear it spin down and up). Additionally, if you can, try and identify where in the computer the hdd is located. It's often not too hard as they tend to be user servicable in most laptops. See if the sound is coming from there, or elsewhere.

 

Could also be coming from your sound system. Unload your sound card's driver with rmmod (post the output of 'lsmod' if you don't know which it is and we'll point it out), and spin the hdd down to see if you can hear anything.

 

James

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Hey guys,

 

When I issue /sbin/hdparm -y /dev/sda I hear the drive spin down and then pick back up. The whine is there all the time. I'm definitely noticing the high-pitched whine is associated with battery usage.

 

The output of my /sbin/lsmod > out.txt is attached.

 

Thanks for all of your suggestions. Note that I'm using kpowersave in KDE.

 

Jon

out.txt

Edited by JonEberger
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Your audio driver is snd-hda-intel. Try killing all sound apps (esd, xmms, arts, whatever) and removing it.

 

The other thing it could be, is a noisy capacitor. I have a similar whine that is audible on my laptop when running a kernel that operating at a high hz. For that, the fix is to either run >=2.6.21 or build a kernel with a hz of 100.

 

James

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The 2.6.21 kernels are the tickless kernels right? Does anyone see a large power consumption decrease with these kernels? Is this noisy capacitor a problem?

 

Jon

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So along these lines, will adding noatime to my fstab for my devices help or hurt my power consumption? I should think it would only help.

 

Thanks,

 

Jon

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