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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."
Kdawson FUD...I'm really confused....
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
Looking at the comments right now, most of them that are critical of Linux are being moderated up quickly. The days of proclaiming slashdot pro-linux bias are gone, slashdot nowadays is a collection of smug mac zealots and bitter windows die-hards attacking anyone who dares say they enjoy using Linux.
I seriously wonder how many other OS's are effected by a similar problem... any aggressive ACPI settings under any OS should kill hard rives...
... 2 years after the fact... and would be hard coded into the kernel some how... in some freakish way...
I wouldn't consider it a "Bug" per see, so much as a configuration problem.
Under M$ this would never be patched... maybe in sp2a
At least for the intelligent they've been able to fix it since it was discovered OVER a year ago.
Ive seen windows kill hard drives too and over more trivial issues.... and normal use.
Don't believe the FUD! lol...
Don't forget, some drives/BIOS are not affected it looks like either... just specific ones that are more susceptible to the funky settings.
Laptop hardware should be DESIGNED for such aggressive power management, sounds like they used a drive not suited to being on/off to cut power...
A server stays on 100% of the time, even when its load avg is low specifically to save the hardware.
Eh.
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).
After hearing all of how Vista is terrible, and how users should get Ubuntu, we now have this.
Since Ubuntu is the greatest thing since sliced bread, it does seem rather remarkable that here Ubuntu is physically damaging hardware. One wonders what the response would be, if there were a similar bug in any Windows version.
I wonder if all of the developers of Ubuntu - everyone in the GPL, would be liable?
This is my sig.
Given the alternative that Vista is the equivalent of being severely rogered up the rectum by Bill Gates huge, black, barbed member, I for one will be hopping over onto Linus' lap, thanks all the same.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
that's the only answer OSS ever has - blame someone else for our shitness.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
It's the thing that I always feared with Ubuntu : somewhat, this distro never gave me the impression that it was done by inhuman skilled people (I won't go as far as say that they just stole debian code, but...). I know that I'm gonna be burned to have said this, but they have tendances to commit serious errors (see the h4x0r1ng of 5 of their main servers... and they pretend to be a serious competitor in the servers market?).
:P), I feel that I have suffered a great blow in my argumentation. And who could blame them?
I wouldn't care about this if their were not collateral damages about this : for ages, people have said me about that it could damage physically their hardware. I have answered at each times "only in MS propaganda". But now, I must admit to these people that, actually, the most used linux flavor did. After that, no matter how I argue that it's not because an application is the most used that it is the best (cf windows