Question

6

Hard drive overheats when laptop running on AC power

rated 0 times [ 6] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 10043 / 3 Years ago, thu, july 1, 2021, 4:37:45

Here is the deal. When using 12.04 laptop runs so cool and quiet but immediately I plug in, the temperature of the Hard drive starts to go up. (hitting 60•C in no time). However when I unplug the AC cable, the temperature drops to normal levels (45-50•C). What could be done to correct this? Thanks in advance

HP PAVILION DV6700
Intel Core Duo 2.0Ghz
4gb RAM
250 GB HDD

Here are pastebins of hdparm and smartctl on my ubuntu partition sda3:

sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda3 (on battery)

sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda3 (on AC)

sudo hdparm -I /dev/sda3 (on battery)

sudo hdparm -I /dev/sda3 (on AC )

sudo hdparm -i /dev/sda3 (on battery)

sudo hdparm -i /dev/sda3 (on AC)

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inglehare

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2 Years ago

answered 3 Years ago montwim · Accepted Answer

Here's the solution:

laptop-mode-tools is controlling power management for your hard drive, and you need to configure it appropriately for your situation.

Open /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf for editing with root privileges, and around line 276 (on Ubuntu 12.04), change this value to 600

NOLM_HD_IDLE_TIMEOUT_SECONDS=7200

This is the amount of time before your drive is told to "spin down" or idle on AC power. 10 minutes with no read/write activity is reasonable.

And around lines 290-291 (on Ubuntu 12.04), change both these values to 1:

LM_AC_HD_POWERMGMT=254

NOLM_AC_HD_POWERMGMT=254

These set the power management level granted to the drive, with 1 being "full" power management, and 254 being "almost zero" power management. The latter setting is the reason for your temperatures, because you can set the level, but how the drive manages power at a level is entirely up to it -- it completely depends on the implementation in the drive's firmware, and can vary by model, manufacturer, etc.

With the changes, we are now telling the drive to perform the same power management it does while on battery (which is satisfactory for you). This is different from simply allowing the drive to spindown while on AC (as in @EliahKagan's answer), because that would still leave the drive's power management set to near zero at level 254.

How to determine power management level

To find out the current level, while on battery, AC, or any other situation:

sudo hdparm -I /dev/sda | grep Advanced (replace sda appropriately)