HDAPS

Hard Drive Active Protection System integration in GNOME. HDAPS is a system that parks hard-drive heads based on accelerometer data to protect it, commonly found in laptops. More info.

Note that this only applies to mechanical hard drives, not SSDs.

Issues

Currently when HDAPS is running GNOME doesn’t react in any way, even though it can be affected. It would be great to have some kind of visual warning:

• HDAPS comes with side-effects, e.g. all disk-related tasks freeze (applications don’t load, files stop being saved) until the disk heads are unparked. Without a warning the user doesn’t know why the freeze happened.
• Without warnings the user might not realize that with rapid movements they can damage the hard-drive.
• The user might not know that there is a mechanism to protect the hard-drive in place, which can lead to excessive care when handling the laptop.

Ideas

• Colour the top of the top bar when the disk heads are parked. Because this is going to happen only when the laptop is being moved with and possible while a freeze is occuring, there will be no need to explain it as the user will associate it with movement.
• Use a warning colour like yellow or orange to signalize that damage wasn’t done but also to warn not to do rapid movements like that.