Bug #17637

Spinning internal hard drive worries users

Added by intrigeri 2020-04-19 16:05:14 . Updated 2020-04-19 16:12:09 .

Status:
Confirmed
Priority:
Normal
Assignee:
Category:
Target version:
Start date:
Due date:
% Done:

0%

Feature Branch:
Type of work:
Research
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Description

Users report hearing their internal hard drive start occasionally, for example:

  • when plugging in an external power source (laptop-mode-tools or similar?)
  • when plugging a USB stick (udisks refreshing its knowledge of all drives?)
  • while Tails is shutting down

AFAIK:

  • I believe default power management configuration spins down the disks faster on battery than on AC (where they might possibly never stop spinning).
  • We don’t do anything special to avoid internal hard drives spinning.
  • I’m not surprised that some normal operations of Tails trigger some read operations on the disks, which makes them spin up.

Related email discussion: “[Tails-dev] Please review & merge bugfix/less-aggressive-hard-disk-APM-on-AC” from March 2013.


Subtasks


Related issues

Related to Tails - Feature #5918: Better internal hard disks lockdown Confirmed

History

#1 Updated by intrigeri 2020-04-19 16:12:09

I would suggest whoever works on it starts by brainstorming possible fixes, then writes down the cheapest one they can think of, along with any possibly problematic behavior change the fix could bring.

For example: we could entirely disable and power off internal hard drives, to ensure they are never, ever spinning; but that would break use cases that we might not support officially, but that we may care about anyway (e.g. storing one’s persistent volume on the internal hard drive).

Perhaps this will be a good conversation opener, that will help us figure out what sort of fix is acceptable or not.

#2 Updated by intrigeri 2020-04-19 16:12:18

  • related to Feature #5918: Better internal hard disks lockdown added