Ubuntu May Be Killing Your Laptop's Hard Drive

wwrmn writes "There's a debate going on over at bugs.launchpad.net on whether it's the Ubuntu, BIOS, hard-drive manufacturer, or pick-any-player's fault, but Ubuntu (and perhaps any OS) may be dramatically shortening the life of your laptop's hard drive due to an aggressive power-saving feature / acpi bug / OS configuration. Regardless of where the fault lies or how it's fixed, you might want to take some actions now to try to prevent the damage."

Comments

Old news???

[BUL2294]

From the now very overloaded page...

Bug #59695, first reported on 2006-09-09.

Apparently there has been no rush to fix it. Now that /. has picked it up and the site is being bombarded, how long till it gets fixed???

Selected Excerpts

[asphaltjesus]

From Google's cache:

When switching to battery power, /etc/acpi/power.sh issues the command hdparm -B 1 to all block devices. This leads to extremely frequent load cycles. For example, my new thinkpad has already done well over 7000 load cycles -- in only 100 hours. That's at least one unloading per minute. Googling for "load unload cycles notebook OR laptop" shows that most laptop drives handle up to 600,000 such cycles. As these values clearly show, this issue is of high importance and should be fixed sooner rather than later.

The command hdparm -b 255 turn off completely APM.

Here is how I permanently fixed it:

1) make a file named "99-hdd-spin-fix.sh". The important thing is starting with "99".
2) make sure the file contains the following 2 lines (fix it if you have PATA HDD):
#!/bin/sh
hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda
3) copy this file to 3 locations: /etc/acpi/suspend.d/ /etc/acpi/resume.d/ /etc/acpi/start.d/

Voila! After that the HDD never spins down on power (looks like it actually spins down on battery at modest rate).
Sorry if the instruction is too detailed, no offense.

An alternative to the "99-hdd-spin-fix.sh" fix is to install and enable the package laptop-mode-tools,
then customize /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf, setting

Re:The Ubuntu

[TypoNAM]

According to gentoo-wiki.com/MAN_hdparm -B is:
Set Advanced Power Management feature, if the drive supports it. A low value means aggressive power management and a high value means better performance. A value of 255 will disable apm on the drive.

I would say blame the hard drive vendor.

Re:Thanks for slashdotting launchpad, guys.

[squiggleslash]

Workaround #1. Edit /etc/hdparm.conf, add the following to the end (or modify the existing /dev/sda area, etc. This assumes your primary disk is your only disk and you're using SATA):

/dev/sda {
apm = 255
spindown_time = 0
}

Then enter "sudo update-rc.d hdparm defaults" to ensure the changes take effect.

Workaround #2, edit /etc/apm/event.d/20hdparm, find the line "APMD_SPINDOWN=18" and add a zero to it (APMD_SPINDOWN=180). Again enter "sudo update-rc.d hdparm defaults".

The first of the options disables the whole spinning down thing. The second changes it so it spins down less (every 15 minutes rather than every minute and a half.)

At least, that's what the Launchpad contributors claim.

Read some of the Ubuntu forums

[bluefrogcs]

Here's the fix http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=596602

Re:The Ubuntu

[timster]

Actually, if you R(TRO)TFA, you'll find that Ubuntu is not issuing that command at all. Rather, this is a default set by the drive manufacturer.

Re:The Ubuntu

[kebes]

First off, putting a launchpad link on the frontpage of Slashdot is bad form. Launchpad is for discussing and resolving bugs, and we're not helping by swamping that page. It might be better if people read the wiki that has been set up to summarize the issue.

In answer to your question about how this isn't Ubuntu's fault, apparently the problem is that the manufacturer sets certain default values for "aggressive power management" and enables this aggressive power management by default. Ubuntu's policy is to not change the manufacturer defaults, and simply uses them. Unfortunately these defaults are "too aggressive" and cause the hard drive to park/unpark too frequently.

But Ubuntu is not blameless. First of all, if Ubuntu can push out a patch that resets the manufacturer defaults to sane values (and this will save some people from hard drive failures), then it definitely should. Also, there is some discussion that perhaps an Ubuntu daemon is probing the hard disk too frequently, so that the hard-drive can't sit in the parked state for long enough to actually make it a useful feature.

Regardless of who is to blame, it would appear that the Ubuntu devs should push out a patch that forces systems to ignore the manufacturer values, and use settings that will protect the drive lifetime.

Cheap test..

[delire]

Ive tested on 3 Ubuntu laptops here and found no problem. Here's a little script to test yourselves (can't remember where i found the greppable bit - perhaps a Planet Ubuntu author).

Run this every hour and compare differences in the load count (the last value in the output written to the file 'load_count' in the current directory).. Replace /dev/sda with your own drive. Not sure which? sudo fdisk -l. You'll need smartmontools (sudo apt-get install smartmontools).

echo `sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep Load_Cycle_Count` " | " `date` >> load_count

If the difference in this count is more than 90 from one hour to the next you may be in trouble if there is anything to this wear and tear fear.

Re:The Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an Dell Inspiron 6400 running Gentoo. I had this problem too. I fixed it by adding

        # -B 255 doesn't work for me
        sda_args="-B 254 -S 60"

to /etc/conf.d/hdparm. This would fix the issue on boot, but after resuming, this would be moot. For that, I added

        # redo hdparm settings on resume /etc/init.d/hdparm restart

after running /etc/acpi/suspend.sh in /etc/acpi/default.sh, though I suppose I could have put that line somwhere in suspend.sh.

The key thing here is to run hdparm on boot *and* on resume

Re:no problem, really!

[blazerw11]

I'll just buy another 4 hard drives with the money I saved not buying Vista!

You may not have to. My Toshiba Satellite M45 has been running Ubuntu since Edgy, 6.10 and has a "Load_Cycle_Count" of 5,416. Maybe the default install does not have this issue? Maybe you have to install some other package to create the problem? It's not "laptop-mode-tools" because I have that installed. Do you have to be on battery power?

It's still 5,416.

193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 5416

From the horses mouth

[orangesunglasses]

http://mjg59.livejournal.com/77672.html
Matthew garret, who runs the laptop testing team. Read this, instead of just spreading FUD.

Re:The Ubuntu

[morgan_greywolf]

Exactly. See this article on thinkwiki about the problem. This is obviously HDD or HDD-controller specific, and is therefore a hardware vendor problem, not an Ubuntu problem. The article is FUD.

It is NOT Ubuntu

[chill]

My company just issued me a Lenovo T60 laptop *yesterday*. I installed Kubuntu 7.10 *last night*. Prior to that it has had Windows XP on it since it was purchased via a corporate sale from Lenovo. It is about 15 months old and the value in question looks like this:

193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 001 001 000 Old_age Always - 2144751

That is 2,144,751 in case the lack of commas throws you. This is just a tad more than the 600,000 that was mentioned in the original bug report, so I don't know out of who's hat that number was pulled.

For completeness, here is the drive info.

Model Family: Seagate Momentus 7200.1 series
Device Model: ST96023AS
Serial Number: 3MG06BZ3
Firmware Version: 4.06

This is not an Ubuntu problem. Read the references

[Wapiti-eater]

It's already been posted, but apparently no one's reading it

=====================
Linux-hero wrote about how Ubuntu kills your hard drive. The situation is somewhat less clear than you might think from the article, but the basic takeaway message is that Ubuntu doesn't touch your hard drive power management settings by default. In almost all cases, it's more likely to be your BIOS or the firmware on your hard drive.

The script that's executed when you plug or unplug your laptop is /etc/acpi/power.sh. The relevant sections are:

function laptop_mode_enable { ...
        $HDPARM -S $SPINDOWN_TIME /dev/$drive 2>/dev/null
        $HDPARM -B 1 /dev/$drive 2>/dev/null
}

That is, when the laptop_mode_enable function is called, we set the drive power parameters. Now, by default laptop_mode_enable isn't called:

if [ x$ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE = xtrue ]; then
        (sleep 5 && laptop_mode_enable)&
fi

because ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE is false in the default install (check /etc/default/acpi-support). This means that, by default, we do not alter the hard drive power settings. In other words, the APM settings that your drive is using in Ubuntu are the ones that your BIOS programmed into it when the computer started. This is supported by the fact that people see this issue after resuming from suspend. We don't touch the hard drive settings at that point, so the only way it can occur is if your BIOS or drive default to this behaviour.

If you enable laptop mode, then we will enable aggressive power management on the drive and that may lead to some reduction in hard drive lifespan. That's a fairly inevitable consequence of laptop mode, since it only makes sense if the laptop enages in aggressive power management. But, as I said, that's not the default behaviour of Ubuntu.

There's certainly an argument that we should work around BIOSes, but in general our assumption has been that your hardware manufacturer has a better idea what your computer is capable of than we do. If a laptop manufacturer configures your drive to save power at the cost of life expectancy, then that's probably something you should ask your laptop manufacturer about.
=====================

Don't fall prey to 'Digg-ish' sensationalism. You all are supposed to know better over here.

Don't use -B 255, use -B 254 instead

[fifirebel]

Since this story hit the front-page I've been monitoring hard drives on three laptops that I can remotely access from work (hi boss).

• Disk 1:
  • Seagate ST96023A (Seagate Momentus 7200.1 series)
  • Power_On_Hours 1438
  • Load_Cycle_Count 187925
  • 130 load/unload per hour (roughly 2 per minute)
• Disk 2:
  • Hitachi HTS721010G9SA00
  • Power_On_Hours 818
  • Load_Cycle_Count 90539
  • 110 load/unload per hour (roughly 2 per minute)
• Disk 3:
  • TOSHIBA MK6006GAH
  • Power_On_Hours 2896
  • Load_Cycle_Count 199757
  • 68 load/unload per hour (roughly 1 per minute)

Then I've been monitoring the hard drive with this one-liner.

lcc() { smartctl -a /dev/hda | grep 'Load_Cycle_Count' | awk '{print $10}'; }; n=$(lcc); while :; do nn=$(lcc); echo "$(date) $((nn-n))"; n=$nn; sleep 60; done

Before you ask, it is only one line, as you only press enter once :-). And that's a short one-liner for me.

This shows on all three laptops that the load counts increases by 1 to 4 every minute.

Now I issued:

hdparm -B 255 /dev/hda

This has stopped load cycles on two drives.
The third one (the TOSHIBA MK6006GAH) still continues loading and unloading like hdparm did not help at all.

However, setting the power-management level to "lowest power savings mode" with:

hdparm -B 254 /dev/hda

did prevent any more load/unload cycles from happening.

So in summary:

1. Use hdparm -B 254 at boot.
2. Re-issue it after every suspend/wake-up cycle as this setting seems to be lost on suspends.