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

[xenesis]

As far as I can tell, the bug is still not fixed.
However after my own experience it is very difficult to fix this bug, as some hardware manufactors seem to have screwed up their power management.

I myself have a Dell Inspiron 1720, whose Hard Disk had problems with an
increasing Load Cycle Count under Intrepid. My fix was to enable laptop-
mode-tools, setting the hdparm -B value to 255 (254 was useless) and to
enable via BIOS the Quiet mode for my HD. (Was somewhere under power
management).

To me it seems that the whole problems seems to come from some specific
technologies like Seagates QuietStep. The idea is, not to stop to HD,
but to spin it down first and then when its longer inactive, it is
really stopped. However without any specific setting, Ubuntu seems to
use the vendor settings of HD, but instead of first spinning down, the
HD is stopped. Thats wrong, because the vendors intention was to first
spin it down a bit and that causes the increasing load cycle count.

The only possible way to fix this is to activate somehow the vendor
specific technology. For my Seagate HD, the above described way worked.
However, as this is vendor specific technology, this fix won't work for
all.

That seems for me to be the reason, why we need sometimes 254, sometimes
255, and sometimes some odd BIOS setting.

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