Controlling Head Parking in Laptop Hard Drives
Posted on March 28, 2009
CT Scholars independent research project, fall 2008 to winter 2009
Modern laptop hard drives usually have a power management feature known as head parking. When used properly, head parking can save power and make a hard drive less susceptible to damage. However, many hard drive firmwares contain a bug that can cause excessive and inefficient use of head parking, leading to rapid wear and tear. Nearly all distributions of the Linux operating system trigger this bug, resulting in numerous failed hard drives and a wave of negative publicity. This project was an attempt to help fix this problem.
- Final report [pdf], with some typos corrected.
- Scratch files [tar.gz], quick-’n-dirty files used in this research. For privacy reasons, my actual disk usage logs are not included.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.