[Bug 59695] Re: High frequency of load/unload cycles on some hard disks may shorten lifetime

[ethanay]

Dell XPS m1330 laptop running hardy 8.04 with latest

none of the ugly fixes above or others that I have encountered elsewhere
have worked; HDD apm value (hdparm -I /dev/sda) after resume from
suspend or hibernate persistently resets to 128.  I get about 5-8
load/unloads per minute.  I have tried adding scripts to /etc/acpi/*.d/,
tried the etc/pm/disk fixes, and tried the hacks which sync hdparm
values with ac/battery modes while enabling laptop-mode via acpi-
support.  Nothing seems to be working in hardy where it worked in gutsy.
so i am still entering hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda manually after each resume
from suspend or hibernate.

Is this a separate bug or part of the same bug and bug fix?  Would any
more information be helpful?

thanks,
ethan

PS seems to me a lot of people have been blaming each-other.  This isn't
*just* a hardware issue, and it's not *just* a software issue.  For my
drive, a default APM value of 128 would be sane IF the software
operating on it was written with that value in mind.  But it wasn't.
Likewise, Ubuntu's frequent disk access would be sane IF the hardware
it's operating on was programmed with that in mind.  But it wasn't.  The
incompatibility isn't really anyone's fault unless we can somehow get
hardware manufacturers and Linux software developers to agree on shared
specs.  It would be wonderful if something like this was in the works.

But in the mean time, the hardware defaults can be changed via software,
which leaves the burden of closing the "insanity gap" solely on Linux
software developers by a) changing the hardware defaults and b) finding
ways to sync hdd i/o requests from the OS and other software if/whenever
the APM is set aggressively.  Without that, we'd just be killing our
hard drives and reducing performance without any added power saving or
bump protection.

-- 
High frequency of load/unload cycles on some hard disks may shorten lifetime
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/59695
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Kernel
Bugs, which is subscribed to linux-meta in ubuntu.