!ORGANIZE! https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Smartmontools http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/ apt-get install smartmontools Use smartctl -h to get a usage summary To display all the SMART information for an IDE drive, run: sudo smartctl -a /dev/hda To display all the SMART information for a SATA drive, run: sudo smartctl -a -d ata /dev/sda Note: This also works for IDE drives in new kernels that are being run through the SCSI stack and show up as /dev/sdX smartctl -t {option} /dev/hdx: offline, short, long, conveyance, select,M-N, pending,N, afterselect,on, afterselect,off smartctl -t short /dev/hda -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Limiting Write Accesses If you don't want to use laptop-mode, you must take special care to disable services that write to your disk frequently - syslogd is a good candidate, for example. You probably don't want to shut it down completely, but it's possible to modify the config file so that "unnecessary" things don't get logged and thus don't create disk traffic. For notebooks, you can use "lm-profiler" to see what processes are unnecessary to save battery power. Using /etc/conf.d/hdparm for disk standby (deb: /etc/hdparm.conf): hda_args="-q -S12" This will activate power management for your hard drive. If you ever want to deactivate power management, you can edit /etc/conf.d/hdparm and change the values to -q -S0, or just run hdparm -q -S0 /dev/hda. See man hdparm for the options. Though you can always start hdparm manually when you are on battery power by running /etc/init.d/hdparm start, it's much easier to automate its startup and shutdown. To do so, add hdparm to the battery runlevel so that it will automatically enable power management. Automate disk standby settings (gentoo syntax) rc-update add hdparm battery Important: Be careful with sleep/spin down settings of your hard drive. Setting it to small values might wear out your drive and lose warranty. http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/power-management-guide.xml#doc_chap5 Another possibility is to deactivate swap in battery mode. Before writing a swapon/swapoff switcher, make sure there is enough RAM and swap isn't used heavily, otherwise you'll be in big problems. Editing /etc/fstab to make /tmp even more volatile It is possible to minimize disk access by mounting certain directories as tmpfs (write accesses are not stored on a disk), but in main memory and get lost with unmounting. Often it's useful to mount /tmp like this - you don't have to pay special attention as it gets cleared on every reboot regardless whether it was mounted on disk or in RAM. Just make sure you have enough RAM and no program (like a download client or compress utility) needs extraordinary much space in /tmp. To activate this, enable tmpfs support in your kernel and add a line to /etc/fstab like this: none /tmp tmpfs size=32m 0 0 #gentoo tmpfs /x tmpfs defaults 0 0 #debian Warning: Pay attention to the size parameter and modify it for your system. If you're unsure, don't try this at all, it can become a performance bottleneck easily. In case you want to mount /var/log like this, make sure to merge the log files to disk before unmounting. They are essential. Don't attempt to mount /var/tmp like this. Portage uses it for compiling... http://technowizah.com/2007/01/debian-how-to-power-management.html --------------------------------------------------------------------------------