I'd like to raise the developers' awareness about bug 59695 [1]: High frequency of load/unload cycles on some hard disks may shorten lifetime
I'm not sure everybody knows about it. It deals with hard disks parking after a too short period of idleness, and waking quickly after that, causing their Load Cycle Count to skyrocket, potentially killing the HD in a few months. I'm not affected by this bug, and I've just read the thread and other related topics. I'm concerned by the fact that people are afraid and thus mix many different issues on the same report, that has become a place to protest, to fear or to ask for help. There seem to be different issues, that can be related to the file system, to running programs, to hdparm settings, to laptop-mode being enabled manually, to hibernate and suspend, and to specific hardware bugs. Thus, we can hardly think of a fix. A kind of fix was included by Debian and got into Hardy, which is: * Set hdparm power management to 254 for all hard drives. (Closes: #448673) But it has not fixed all issues. And it appears to cause some HD to heat, which can possibly be dangerous. But this may just be an illusion. One interesting point is that it seems Ubuntu does not let drives sleep for more than a few seconds, and then forces them to wake up, even when no action is performed by the user. This may be related to the filesystem settings and should be fixed as a general rule. Maybe it would be good that a developer triage all this mess, apply some patches to fix most trivial issues and above all reassure people about this, since for now we cannot even distinguish between different problems. If some HD models are broken, we should be sure it's the case, and ensure normal cases are handled correctly. I know it's easy to ask and harder to work, but I think we are numerous wanting to help triaging: if somebody with the needed knowledge and ready to apply patches is OK to tackle that, I and many others are ready to help. For now, some try to sum up the issues but it's rather discouraging. Thanks - this is the only critical bug that got into Hardy, one of the most stable Ubuntu releases I've used! 1: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/59695 2: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/acpi-support/+bug/229693 -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss