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

[Brian Visel]

Good info!

It shouldn't be too difficult to include a script that monitors the
system for the bug, to be run by cron, then notifies the user, providing
an option to automatically disable power management on the disk if so.
I could do that.  Is there a way I could get it published, if I did make
such a script?

On Thu, 2008-05-01 at 06:58 +0000, Chris Cheney wrote:
> 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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