How can I control the automatic power management feature of my SATA disk drives? Right now the heads are unloading so frequently that within one year I will have exceeded the rated number of load/unload cycles for the drives. The drives are Western Digital model WD10EADS. I tried using "hdparm -B 254" and "hdparm -B 0", but neither works:
# hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda
/dev/sda: setting Advanced Power Management level to 0xfe (254) HDIO_DRIVE_CMD failed: Input/output error HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(identify) failed: Input/output error # hdparm -B 0 /dev/sda
/dev/sda: setting Advanced Power Management level to 0xfe (254) HDIO_DRIVE_CMD failed: Input/output error HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(identify) failed: Input/output error
My efforts to find anything useful with 'sdparm' have been fruitless.