Comment 12 for bug 315970

Scott thanks for the info but I believe you have misidentified the problem. The bug I reported has nothing to do with G-P-M's ability to control hard drive power management, or lack thereof. The problem is that G-P-M is writing to the disk about once per minute, for the frivolous purpose of recording battery discharge history. This in itself prevents the hard drive from taking advantage of its internal power management capabilities.

The situation becomes much worse if users are following the common practice of enabling Laptop Mode, which tells the hard drive spin down after periods of inactivity. In this case G-P-M's frequent disk writes cause many spin-up/spin-down cycles, which can lead to premature hard drive failure.

The title of this bug "g-p-m keeps disk spinning" is a misnomer, because the actual bug has nothing to do with disk spinning, it is the frequent disk writes, which depending on other configuration settings can either just be annoying, or can cause serious problems for the laptop hard drive.

Forgive me if I'm wrong about this, but I think everything I wrote is correct.