Path: csiph.com!v102.xanadu-bbs.net!xanadu-bbs.net!news.glorb.com!news-out.readnews.com!transit3.readnews.com!panix!not-for-mail From: wrat@panix.com (the wharf rat) Newsgroups: comp.sys.laptops Subject: Re: 2,5" hdd laptop & Linux Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2013 18:28:49 +0000 (UTC) Organization: Public Access Networks Corp. Lines: 24 Message-ID: References: <4d535e2f-4491-4c82-aea1-c379ab6845c9@googlegroups.com> <0b078ac3-bcc3-4033-af05-fd6f53096d88@googlegroups.com> <66b090bc-56d3-4ace-9dd3-7301ec9d82c9@googlegroups.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix2.panix.com X-Trace: reader2.panix.com 1364322529 13884 166.84.1.2 (26 Mar 2013 18:28:49 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@panix.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2013 18:28:49 +0000 (UTC) X-Newsreader: trn 4.0-test76 (Apr 2, 2001) Xref: csiph.com comp.sys.laptops:1894 In article <66b090bc-56d3-4ace-9dd3-7301ec9d82c9@googlegroups.com>, Don Juan wrote: > >Ok, thanks, but I'm worried primarily about this issue: >https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Known_issues#Drives_which_perform_frequent_head_unloads_under_Linux > Seems pretty much a non-issue. It's not because of Linux (you're just reading about it on a kernel forum :-), but because of a buggy interaction between certain laptop IDE drives and power management. It seems to depend on the installation platform as well as the particular drive since manifestation is dependent on IO patterns. The issue here with WD is that WD chooses to require their own special program to reset APM parameters on a few models (I'm not sure you can use hdparm on their "Green" drives). That could be seen as "incompatibility" but it's really WD's choice to support only Windows. That's a good reason to avoid WD. If you end up with a set of hardware that manifests this bug it's not really a big deal, and can be worked around easily with hdparm. Frankly, you can avoid all these kinds of things by using last generation hardware for Linux. Older stuff is well supported and Linux doesn't need the latest hardware to run rings around Windows systems.