Comment 2 for bug 374121

Thank you for taking the time to report this issue and help to improve Ubuntu.

As you note, reverting to acpi-support 0.114 lowers the HD temp, but brings excessive load cycles instead. These are not unrelated; the higher HD temp is a direct consequence of elimitating the excessive parking problem. There's no setting we know of that will work across all hard drives and avoid both the load cycle and power consumption issues.

We should, however, make acpi-support's 90-hdparm.sh script smarter so that it can use a "preferred" APM setting shared with other tools such as hdparm.