I can hear my drive stopping and restarting constantly. In some cases the drive was on for less than 45 seconds before stopping again, only to restart less than 5 seconds later. The drive is a brand-new 2.5in SATA drive. Also, all my changes to the power managements settings using mate power manager are ignored.
It seems this is a drive problem as it exists in Windows as well and it ignores 'hdparm -S 240 /dev/sda'
WDC WD5000BPVT for the curious
I suspect it is actually a BUG. My drive does the same. From 'watch hdparm -B /dev/sda' and 'watch hdparm -M /dev/sda' it is evident that tuned alters these parameters frequently and completely neglects settings in 'Gnome Disks'. Sometimes it forces too small values for the APM. In pre-F19, everything worked fine . So I assume that the logic behind APM adjustments has been changed in the recent versions of tuned. As the result my 'Start/Stop count' has raised by about 10k since F-19 Alpha, which is really BAD. The funny thing is that tuned lets HDD to spindown when music and movies are played. For sure it is because of caching, but tuned should be aware of this kind of things. WDC WD2500BEKT-75PVMT0 (WD Scorpio Black) tuned-2.2.2-1.fc19