Comment 22 for bug 63937

I cannot confirm or deny it on my Dell Inspiron 9400 with a Hitachi HTS541616J9SA00 SATA drive, but it does make a pretty loud noise at shutdown. According to the drive's specs:

http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/8037F4603FE5B763862571840068043C/$file/5K160_SATA_spv1.2.pdf

QUOTE: "6.3.6: Load/unload

The product supports a minimum of 600,000 normal load/unloads.

Load/unload is a functional mechanism of the hard disk drive. It is controlled by the drive micro code. Specifically, unloading of the heads is invoked by the following commands:

* COMRESET
* Standby
* Standby immediate
* Sleep

Load/unload is also invoked as one of the idle modes of the drive.

The specified start/stop life of the product assumes that load/unload is operated normally, not in emergency mode

6.3.6.1 Emergency unload

[...] The drive supports a minimum of 20,000 emergency unloads.

6.3.6.2 Required Power-Off Sequence

The required host system sequence for removing power from the drive is as follows:

* Step 1: Issue one of the following commands.
   - Standby
   - Standby immediate
   - Sleep
   Note: Do not use the Flush Cache command for the power off sequence because this command does not invoke Unload.

Step 2: Wait until the Command Complete status is returned.
[...]

Step 3: Terminate power to the HDD.

This power-down sequence should be followed for entry into any system power-down state, system suspend state, or system hibernation state. In a robustly designed system, emergency unload is limited to rare scenarios, such as battery removal during operation." (END QUOTE)

This indicates that Johan's comment is not correct at least for this drive, and that this really is required. And that the kernel is probably killing my drive at every shutdown. 20,000 versus 600,000 supported spindowns is a *very* hefty difference. If this is representative for SATA notebook drives, this bug should at least be marked important, at the minimum.