Comment 7 for bug 124119

As i have said in that blog, the issue was not new when it was blogged by him, since launchpad contains many unanswered bug reports that largely predate those blog posts. But he had the merit of centralizing available information in one location and thus attracting a large audience to help solve hard drive power management problems in Ubuntu. Kudos to him for his effort.

I can sympathize with respecting BIOS / drive default behavior whenever possible. However, if you look closely this script does not honor the *bios* or *user specified configurations*.

As I have said before, here we have a script that decides unilaterally on hdparm settings (which by the way are too aggressive) without honoring the laptop-mode and hdparm configurations.

The fact that ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE is not enabled by default can't be seen as an excuse not to address this script's behavior because there are many users that will enable laptop mode at some moment after initial instalation.

Also, more savy users will want to adjust hdparm.conf to their specific hardware and won't appreciate this script's behavior.

This script should check hdparm.conf (as it is the main configuration for hdparm related stuff) and then laptop-mode.conf (if laptop mode is enabled) to check if the user has special requirements for hard drive. If it finds something on those configs, honor them. If not, respect BIOS settings. But never resort to an hardcoded value inside a script. It is, IMHO, a bad practice.