Remember that new hard drive I put in my laptop a few weeks ago? Well, I've been noticing short pauses when doing certain things that require disk access, like sending IMs (writes to a log) or clicking a link in the web browser. The drive was also parking the heads a *LOT*, we're talking parking a half second after each disk access. I figured these two events might be related somehow.
So I did some research. The drive takes a whole 300ms to go from parked to reading data. That's a freaking *ETERNITY* in the world of computers. All this to save, get this: 0.2W when idle.
NOT WORTH IT!
So I downloaded ftool (Feature Tool) from the Hitachi website and selected the drive. Not only did it have the Low Power Idle, with its 300ms head unpark cost enabled, but it also had acoustic management turned on, which further reduces performance to be a tiny bit quieter. No way!
I turned Low Power Idle and Acoustic mode *OFF* and saved the settings to the drive as default.
There is no longer a delay when hitting the disk. There also also no more "kit-a-chunk" head parking sound every few seconds, AND the machine feels a good deal faster.
So if you have a Hiatchi drive in your laptop, you might want to look into it. The default power saving mode is needlessly aggressive, causing a major performance hit at the cost of only a tiny bit of battery savings.
Safety feature?
Isn't it a good thing to keep the head parked in case the laptop gets a bump? Might save it form cutting into the platter surface?
Though I guess as long as you have a recent backup or nothing important to save then you might just want to live with that risk.
Yes, BUT!! Those settings
Yes, BUT!!
Those settings were way too aggressive for normal use. It was literally less than a second of idle before the heads would park. The drive I had in there previously would wait about 20 seconds before parking, which is much more reasonable.
Not only does this reduce performance but it adds wear and tear to the drive.
Ftool on Mac?
Hello Zorin,
I read your article about the feature tool with interest. Since I changed the HDD of my macbook pro to a Hitachi 200GB 7200 I am having similar problems with click noise and delay. But my question is how did you get the feature tool to run? My macbook won't accept the bootdisk cdimage from the hitchi homepage
Cheers, daniel
I didn't do it on the Mac...
I had to rip the Macbook Pro apart again and put the drive in a generic PC at work. I was then able to set it up correctly.
The problems stems from the BIOS "emulation" that Macs use; it's enough to get Windows or Linux booted, but not enough to do much else requiring real mode.
I guess I should have been more clear in my post. :)
power saving mode
hi ,
the power saving mode is not actually as it sounds to save power ,
but it is used to save the battery usage because as all know the laptop weakest point is the battery and it will fail sooner if you dont use power saving.
so when you are working on battery use the power saving and if you are working on electricity dont use it
.
thanks
bye