bug in ubuntu "kill" hardrive

[Derek Broughton]

Dotan Cohen wrote:

> On 26/12/2007, manuel mizael gonzalez contreras <nolitomas at hotmail.com>
> wrote:
>> is true that there is a bug that makes that the hard disk  get killed?
> 
> It is true that there is such a bug. It is not true that the bug is in
> Ubuntu.

That is the really annoying attitude that the Ubuntu devs have taken.  It's
wrong, and wrong-headed.

> The bug is in the default hard drive configuration as set by the
> manufacturer. The reason that Windows does not hammer the drive is
> because Windows has yet another bug, which causes the OS to ignore the
> drive's default configuration settings. 

I don't believe you can prove that.  imo (and that of many others) the "bug"
is that the default drive configurations are reasonable, but Ubuntu is
causing periodic writes that keep waking up the drive just after it has
retracted the head.  Windows doesn't do that - tests on Windows have shown
that it probably does respect those defaults, unless the defaults are
specifically wrong in the current situation.  Ubuntu _need_ not wake the
drive so often - but it would need all apps doing I/O to be fixed.  It
should take the (apparent) Windows approach that if the drive is being
force to wake too often, the timer should be extended.  Instead, the devs
just insist its the manufacturer's fault, and that complaints should be
directed there (to which we all know, they'd say "this drive is not
certified to work with Linux").  And then they complain that people are
making too many posts to the bug report...
-- 
derek