Ubuntu Causing Laptop HDD Failure?

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Has there been an update to this Ubuntu kills laptop HDDs story? It keeps popping up but I haven’t seen anything else on it in a while. Anyone? Thanks to Vashypooh for reminding me about this one.

When switching to battery power, /etc/acpi/power.sh issues the command hdparm -B 1 to all block devices. This leads to extremely frequent load cycles. For example, my new thinkpad has already done well over 7000 load cycles -- in only 100 hours. That's at least one unloading per minute. Googling for "load unload cycles notebook OR laptop" shows that most laptop drives handle up to 600,000 such cycles. As these values clearly show, this issue is of high importance and should be fixed sooner rather than later.
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This story keeps popping up, week after week (this time on /.) but no one seems to have an update. Anyone?
 
Wow, I really hope that isn't all true. I've been running Ubuntu on my HP dv9000 for at least a month...no problem so far. Well, nothing above the usual that is.
 
and everyone likes to bash M$, I like both platforms, but I'll stick with a company that is dedicated to the OS......and all the spaghetti code that it entails.....:D

I'd be pissed if it destroyed my hardware.....thats some serious code error.....:eek:......<if its true>
 
It looks like further down the thread there is a "fix".

I had not thought about loading it on one of my laptops until now, but unless they fix/patch it themselves that though will be real fleeting
 
wow and that explanation makes zero sense. if ms was doing this there would be class action lawsuits coming out of the wood work. when a two-bit open source os does it there is nada.
 
Hmm I had a laptop harddrive die in my older acer notebook that was running ubuntu... This could be the reason but I really have no clue.
 
I had my HD stop working on me once so far, but that was 48 hours of non-stop downloading then when I started do multi-task the HD seemed to have stopped responding. But after a reboot everything seemed to work fine, and has been for a few weeks now.
 
I had an earlier release of Ubuntu on my ThinkPad, and it worked great except for the wireless (which i hear has been much improved in the last couple years). However, when i saw on Phoronix how the latest release actually falls behind in power consumption compared to the last couple, i put the bookmark back in the "Ubuntu on Laptop" story and went back to what i was doing.

However, as far as the explanation given in this thread goes, i'd say it's perfectly valid. If MS routinely overrides BIOS APCI settings, then clearly the Ubuntu method is the "correct" one. Not that it makes destroying hardware acceptable: there ought to be a patch released to inform the user to change their BIOS to more acceptable settings.
 
Flandry said:
However, as far as the explanation given in this thread goes, i'd say it's perfectly valid. If MS routinely overrides BIOS APCI settings, then clearly the Ubuntu method is the "correct" one. Not that it makes destroying hardware acceptable: there ought to be a patch released to inform the user to change their BIOS to more acceptable settings.
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It's not a "BIOS setting," it's a power setting in the firmware of the hard drive.

Why would a hard drive ship with such a setting? Because it would be overridden more than 99.3% of the time anyways. ;) I mean, for power benchmarks in reviews it probably helps.
 
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