I'm starting to feel a bit frustrated with Booklet. It's basically very nice piece of hardware, but Poulsbo is so big failure in so many ways. Fucked up beyond any repair, you could say. But it may be possible to live with that anyway...
Anyway, yesterday I started to investigate this clicking sound I heard. It was obviously HD spindown. It made every 10-15 sec, basicly no matter what I did. Not very nice. Looking at 'sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda|grep 'Load_Cycle_Count'' showed that value is increasing like 1000 per day. Not very nice in any way.
First, I tried 'sudo hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda', without any big success. Then I tried 'sudo hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda' (to disable APM totally), without any success. I also tried to set big standby timeout ('sudo hdparm -S 241 /dev/sda'), that wasn't success either.
I couldn't find easily any reasonable reasons for spindown. I tried to disable them via Gnome's Power Management, without any success again. There wasn't any laptop-mode's set, so that couldn't be it. I then found one page,
http://techjamaica.com/forums/showthread.php?t=90496, which had some hints. Well, I hadn't had any luck with more popular ways, so I tried these instructions.
sudo apt-get install laptop-mode-utils
/etc/default/acpi-support:
Add "ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE=true" in the end of file
/etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf:
Change line "HD=..." to "HD=/dev/sda"
Change line "BATT_HD_POWERMGMT=..." to "BATT_HD_POWERMGMT="254"
sudo echo 5 > /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode
/etc/init.d/laptop-mode restart
According to linked website, that should do the trick. It didn't, even after rebooting, I heard clicks every 10-15 secs. I then started to play more with laptop-mode, I tweaked it a bit more
/etc/laptop-mode/conf.d/intel-hda-powersafe.conf
Change line "INTEL_HDA_DEVICE_TIMEOUT=..." to "INTEL_HDA_DEVICE_TIMEOUT=1800"
Change line "INTEL_HDA_DEVICE_CONTROLLER=..." to "INTEL_HDA_DEVICE_CONTROLLER=0"
/etc/sysctl.conf:
Add "vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs=1500" in the end of file
Add "vm.laptop_mode=5" in the end of file
At this point, I decided to go to sleep, as it was way too night for hacking. I still could hear the clicks, also I got yet-another-kernel-oops, which looked to be related to filesystem/ext4. I already thought to revert back to 9.10, as Ubuntu's wiki says that it should be perfectly supported.
Big surprise was today, when I powered Booklet up, and I haven't heard any clicks so far. I mean, I have had it open for few hours now, and Load_Cycle_Count has increased just by one or two. I'll definately will be following this.