Hard drive runs continually

[T6]

i think i heard that too, activity and noise, sounds like heads moving to the beginning of the plate

[OMSkates]

Had you tried disabling speedfan? [amendment; "SpeedFan not available to Linux " sorry]

The cause is SpeedFan utility that monitors temperatures of mobo, CPU and HDDs (via SMART). Other temperatures are polled every 10 seconds or more frequently but even SMART polling is done once a minute. WD unloads faster than that, even at most conservative setting in wdidle tool and result is always 1440 cycles.

I have "solved" the problem by stopping using SpeedFan

[Ditzian]

I checked the services that are running and there is no mention of Speedfan.  I did see smartd, which is the SMART daemon.  Are you saying to turn off smartd?  I also ran a file search for Speedfan and did not find it.  Does Speedfan have another name, or is it an option in another program that I am running?

Jan

[OMSkates]

I checked the services that are running and there is no mention of Speedfan.  I did see smartd, which is the SMART daemon.  Are you saying to turn off smartd?  I also ran a file search for Speedfan and did not find it.  Does Speedfan have another name, or is it an option in another program that I am running?

Jan

Ditzian, so sorry, for some reason I thought Speedfan was a universal WD tool but it looks to be a Winders only. I'm wondering if you were to install laptop related packages from Synaptic for additional power management.  You may be able to obtain more spin-down control this way.