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

The Ubuntu

[bazald]

FTA:

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. It definitely sounds like it is "the Ubuntu" that is at fault in this case. Where is the room for doubt?

Re:The Ubuntu

[kebes]

Does Windows automagically disable this behavior? Good question. The comments in the bug report speculate that Windows either completely ignores this feature, or ignores the manufacturer values and uses its own values. (In either case, what's the point in having BIOS set defaults?)

A conspiracy theorist might suggest that the hardware manufacturers are intentionally adding a feature that causes the drives to fail eventually (but statistically outside of the manufacturer's warranty period), so that people have to buy more hardware. The more likely explanation is that the manufacturer set the defaults, but didn't notice that the values were unsafe because Windows ignores them.

Getting Ubuntu to override the defaults should be viewed as a short-term solution. Ultimately the hardware manufacturers should be setting default values that will not damage the hardware. Ideally they would design safeties into the hardware, which do sanity checks and reject ridiculous values.

Re:The Ubuntu

[PhilipMckrack]

I think the answer is they should both fix the problem. Drive manufacturers should issue a sane value and operating systems should check that the value is sane before using it. Same rule as accepting any data from an outside source, you tell them what they are supposed to do, but then you double check it to make sure they did. Pointing fingers at each other while customers hardware fries doesn't help anyone.

Re:The Ubuntu

[Score Whore]

I keep seeing people say "it's the hard drive (manufacturers) fault." No it's not. You don't ask a hard drive to go into ultra low power mode if you are planning on coming back to it in just a few seconds. Ubuntu needs to pull it's head out of it's backside and stop and think about how often it hits the drive after it suggests to the drive that it's not going to be used with any frequency. This is entirely a ubuntu problem or perhaps more generally a linux problem.

Ubuntu?

[keithjr]

If perhaps it could be "any OS" then why headline this as "Ubuntu" killing laptops? I can't find much in TFA that makes a compelling case that it isn't APCI. I'd read more but that page hurts my eyes.

Isn't this what is supposed to happen?

[zappepcs]

I mean, the OSS community at large finds a problem, and sets about to fix it... from the link:

Ralf Nieuwenhuijsen wrote on 2007-10-25: (permalink)

May i just warn ya all to NOT play the blame-game?

It does sound like it's the fault of the BIOS (and somebody should contact them).

To rescue a hard-drive in distress sounds like something that should have a high-priority (critical?).
Not because it's ubuntu's fault or the bios fault. But because Ubuntu can solve this issue _now_. Doesn't sound like it is NOT being dealt with, it just isn't listed everywhere as critical and in the news all over the intarweb tubes.

Re:AHA! :D

[ajs]

That's why I use windows. So I don't have to wonder who the culprit is Oh? Then you've never been caught in the "it's the graphics driver, no it's the motherboard, no it's the OS, no it's the graphics driver," loop.

This thread sucks...

[Ecuador]

I mean, if it was Windows that was destroying laptop hard drives, this would have been a legendary thread, with viciously bashing comments, insightfully (40%) funny (20%) attacks against MS, Vista drama etc.
With Ubuntu as the culprit there is some sort of "respect" that kills the potential of the thread. Come on guys, it is not Linux, it is just Ubuntu. What are the SuSE/RH/etc fans waiting for?

Not Entirely Accurate

[marcantonio]

It's important to note that this only occurs if ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE is enabled. By default it is NOT set. From /etc/default/acpi-support:

# Switch to laptop-mode on battery power - off by default as it causes odd
# hangs on some machines
ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE=false

Missing the point...

[msimm]

With Vista it's Microsoft's fault. With Ubuntu (or any open source project) technically, it's our fault. So if you're confused about the missing flames maybe you need to rethink what Open means.

Re:no problem, really!

[dlZ]

I'd rather spend the extra money on Vista/Windows than have an OS that could potentially crash my hard-drive. And given the fact that laptops are all that some of us use, it's not worth the extra effort (assuming the article is right, of course).

I'd say it's more of hard drive manufacturer issue. I have 3 notebooks all running Ubuntu, and the one with a Hitachi HD had this problem, but the other two with Fujitsu HD's didn't. Luckily it took about 5 seconds to fix it. If the manufacturer set a realistic cycle this wouldn't be an issue. Ubuntu is just telling the hard drive to do it's thing, and unfortunately the hardware is set to commit suicide it seems.

fudmuffin

[EmbeddedJanitor]

proposed new autotag for all kdawson stuff.