Comment 593 for bug 59695

1) I use my laptop almost the entire time on battery power. I bought one of this small, long-lasting Netbooks, which you can take everywhere and which you will not often use with power cable attached: an EeePC 1000H.
2) With Windows XP, i don't hear any clicks. There seem to be no load cycles while the laptop is on.
3) With default Intrepid, the head is parked every few seconds, far too much. I just can't see, how this should enhance battery power. I changed that to the save Windows XP behavior.
4) If Ubuntu could park the head and leave it there for some time, everything would be fine. Unfortunately, there is just too much disk access rendering the head parking thing entirely useless and destroying the hard disk.
5) If Ubuntu uses the hard disk that differently from Windows XP, and puts my hard disk at risk, I call it a bug. Intentionally implementing is even worse. I also found out, that while -B 191 parks the head roughly as often as -B 128, -B 192 doesn't park it at all.
6) Conclusion: fix this. As it seems, some hard disks work entirely different on this matter as others. The only way to fix this bug ist therefore the openSUSE way: Use a Blacklist that knows, how to handle specific disks and apart from that use safe values. Safe values as in: "Utilize the disk the same way Windows does, because that's what the manufacturer had in mind."