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

[Chris Cheney]

This is most definitely a "bug" in the hard drive firmware settings in
how quickly it parks the head after being idle. It affects MacOS X and
Windows users along with Linux users in general not just Ubuntu. I have
found posts on other sites referencing the problems for their users as
well. The only thing those users were able to do about fixing the
problem was to turn off the power management completely by doing the
equivalent of hdparm -B 254 (setting the register to 0xFE). I have
included links below referencing the problem showing up on the other
OSes.

Completely disabling power management however will cause the head never
to park and if the system is jolted could potentially cause the hard
drive heads to crash into the platter. So 'fixing' this across the board
by disabling head parking altogether is not really a good solution
either.

Probably the only reason some users don't see this behavior under
Windows but do under Linux is that their Windows install probably never
allows the drive to be idle enough to park the head. This was the case
on my machine before I cleaned off the OEM install which had lots of
bloatware on it and reinstalled Vista from scratch, it would never stop
writing to the disk. Which would also mean if the drive is jolted too
hard it would crash as well. So no Windows doesn't have this problem
'fixed'.

My post on ubuntuforums.org about it:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=4830919

MacOS X:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7055342

Windows:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=191167

So the ball is in the manufacturer's court in that they need to adjust
the head parking idle time to something more sensible, or at least
provide utilities that can allow the user to tweak the setting. Hitachi
for one does not provide this ability.

-- 
High frequency of load/unload cycles on some hard disks may shorten lifetime
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/59695
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