SATA harddisk spins up and down - disable HDD rest / sleep

Introduction
Yesterday (11. November 2018) I installed openSUSE Leap 15.0 with the KDE desktop. It is the 2nd time I had installed and are used a SUSE system, first time was since the paid-for SUSE Linux 7.2.

So far, so good, and it works great, apart from the fact that I am a total rookie / newbie user of the KDE desktop.

The Problem
My problem is that the (mechanical) hard disk is spinning up and down continuously - with a only a few second apart.

That courses a response delay (lag) of about 3 seconds when I do just about anything, for example switching between Firefox windows.

It would be okay with a spin down after 15 minutes, because if I had done nothing within 15 minutes I am doing something else for hours.
I am used to that there is no spin down at all (default configuration on Xubuntu) so that is what I would prefer. The extra energy usage is not a problem.

… and BTW :

hdaparm -S0

… doesn’t work (0 is the number zero). I do know that the -s (lower case ‘s’) option is dangerous (according to its man page), so that option had not been used

Is hdparm only usable on IDE hard disk?

Hardware
The CPU cooler sounds like it could break down at any moment if it (the CPU cooler) is spinning horizontally, so right now it is spinning vertically. That means that the HDD is spinning in a vertical position
The fact that the HDD is spinning vertically and spins down and up continuously can’t be healthy in the long run.

My computer has 16 GB physical RAM, of which the kernel has no idea of how it could use (right now) about 12 GB physical RAM, buffer/cache is using about 2 GB. CPU is a AMD FX8350 8-cores@4 GHz. Swap is always unused (expect when a program has a serious memory leak).

About me
When you are writing a response to me, this is useful information

I had began using Linux from November 1998 (RedHat Linux with GNOME 1) until Febuary 2006 due to i began studying. I began using a Linux distro (Xubuntu) from Juli 2009 to yesterday.

I am used to use the (bash) shell, and I do some programming - incl (Linux) kernel modules - now and then.

Sorry for my bad English. English is not my native language, so it is at times a bit difficult.

/Lars

You did fine.

I have never had a problem with disks spinning up/down. Have you checked whether there is a BIOS setting for this?

The physical orientation of PC hardware is not an issue.

What is an issue is, «dust».

  • Power off the box, remove the power cable, and open the case.
  • Use a vacuum cleaner to suck away any dust which has accumulated in the case and especially within the cooling fans, and also within the fins of the heat-sinks.
  • Reassemble the case, return it to it’s normal position, plug the power cable back in and, reboot.

@lath:

Are any of the following packages installed?

  • laptop-mode-tools
  • patterns-desktop-laptop
  • patterns-openSUSE-laptop
  • Anything «patterns-???-???_laptop
    »

If they are, deinstall them and everything else which resembles Laptop tools which the patterns have pulled into the system.