Comment 534 for bug 59695

I'm highly in favor of the blacklist approach used by Novell/openSUSE as well. It tracks different laptop/hard disk combinations and knows exactly which apm value (254/255) fixes the problem for each entry. The storage-fixup script was written and is maintained by kernel developer Tejun Heo by the way, you can read more information and find the latest version of the script and config file at http://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Known_issues

If your drive isn't listed yet, you can add the config yourself by looking at the examples and comparing with the output of "dmidecode", "hdparm -I /dev/sda" and "smartctl -a /dev/sda" on your system. You're encouraged to send Tejun Heo this information and whether hdparm -B 254/255 fixes it, so the drive db gets more and more complete. You can do this by mailing <email address hidden> like I did here: http://marc.info/?l=linux-ide&m=122082089712147&w=2

This way regular users won't need to use trial and error to see which apm value is needed to disable it.