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

Ubuntu

[Andrewkov]

It seems to be killing Slashdot's hard drives also!

Re:Ubuntu

[Endo13]

Slashdot seems to be ok, but it looks like it killed launchpad.net's drives.

Re:Ubuntu

[Andrewkov]

I was getting an error message on Slashdot when trying to access this thread earlier. Maybe I was the only one. But it did seem like the story was on the front page for a long time before any comments were made.

Re:Ubuntu

[Hal_Porter]

but Ubuntu [...] may be dramatically shortening the life of your laptop's hard drive due to an aggressive power-saving feature I always thought that Gibbon was just a bit too gutsy! You should have waited for Apathetic Ape. I hear that doesn't bother at all with power management.

Re:Ubuntu

[It'sYerMam]

On the other hand it doesn't need it. It's permanently in Sleep mode.

Re:Ubuntu

[wlad]

Every time you say that might be killing a kitten!

Re:Ubuntu

[jimmypw]

In Soviet Russia Hard drives kill YOU!!!

Re:Ubuntu

[jayminer]

You won't believe that I still laugh at this joke..

Re:Ubuntu

[TractorBarry]

Aren't you sure you're not thinking of Snoozing Sloth ?

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

[smilindog2000]

Something's goofy... I just switch my Inspiron 9400 to battery power. It's only been about 10 minutes, but so far my Load_Cycle is sticking at 1 where it started. I'm not seeing this problem. It might be laptop-specific.

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: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.

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:The Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn you cursed slashdot! There was a newline in there!

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

in /etc/acpi/default.sh

Re:The Ubuntu

[Kjella]

I actually disagree. Sure, if the manufacturer issues a recommendation or something to change it, then by all means. Otherwise Ubuntu should just keep their hands off and let the HDD manufacturer deal with it. Does Windows automagically disable this behavior?

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

[eln]

It's only been about 10 minutes, but so far my Load_Cycle is sticking at 1 where it started. You have to pull the knob out to get it to start the other cycles. It won't start the Spin_Cycle until you close the lid, though.

Re:The Ubuntu

[cmowire]

I tend to think that somebody ought to take a fine toothed comb through a fairly standard desktop linux setup with a fairly standard set of applications and daemons and ruthlessly examine every disk access.

It seems like most of the things that are desirable for a server that are merely OK on a desktop are probably really bad for laptops and there's optimizations to be made.

And I'm not just thinking of Linux here. When I use a Windows laptop, I notice the hard disk spinning up on a fairly regular basis, even when I'm doing something fairly lame like web browsing or word processing. And you know that pretty much nobody thinks about it without being prodded....

But with Linux, you could make "Lapbuntu" that would contain a set of apps that were modified to aggressively avoid using the disk unless it's already spun up by patching existing software.

Re:The Ubuntu

[EdelFactor19]

If that was the case than why is this article especially pertinent to ubuntu wouldnt it be pertinent to all? any chance a class action against the hard drive makers will come of this?

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.

Re:The Ubuntu

[AvitarX]

This is ~ 400 days of pure run time.

If we assume that half of the time was on battery we end up with 200 days on battery. Considering your not goign to be using it on battery for than a few hours a day (we'll call it 6) that is 800 days of use. Not too great, but not terrible either.

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

[mhall119]

I believe Beagle is setup by default not to index while Ubuntu is in a power-saving mode. Then again, Beagle was replaced by Tracker in 7.10 (Gutsy), so maybe Tracker doesn't have a similar option.

Re:The Ubuntu

[MMC Monster]

How the heck are HDD manufacturers supposed to push out a patch to end users?

Heck. I don't even know the manufacturers of the hard drives in my current PC (I bought them a couple years ago).

Re:The Ubuntu

[NoOneInParticular]

The manufacturer creates a recommendation based on a particular hard-drive usage scenario (read: Windows). If Ubuntu is using the hard-drive differently than expected, for instance by accessing the disk when the system is idle, this will break manufacturer's expectations and all bets are off.

Ubuntu has either to fix the OS's hard-drive usage pattern to mimic the expected usage, or set their own policy for parking disk heads. In both cases, it's Ubuntu's fault for not thinking this through, and they should create a fix.

Re:The Ubuntu

[zhenya00]

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.

Bull. The OS should NOT be mucking around with changing low-level hardware device settings. Ubuntu is doing EXACTLY what they should be doing in honoring the existing hardware configuration, whether set by the manufacturer or directly by the user. This 'bug' is FUD pure and simple from people who understand just enough to be dangerous.

Now if there is, in fact a daemon causing too frequent disk access for power management to work properly, then that bug should be fixed. Pushing a patch to change people's power management settings is exactly the wrong thing to do as it treats the symptom, not the cause. I've had this same behavior on my XP laptop too, but recognized that it was a bug in a program and took steps to fix the program. If Windows had automatically changed my drive's power management settings I'd both likely not noticed the bug in the program AND had worse battery life. Yeah!

Re:The Ubuntu

[arcade]

But Ubuntu is not blameless.

Yes it is.

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.

Sure, the ubuntu people should detect all magic hardware faults and fix them .. by magic! Great solution! And if they for some reason don't discover that the hardware manufacturer has fucked up badly - then they are to blame! If the disk has an internal thingie that is set to self destruct - then the Ubuntu people should not only discover it - They Should Disable It!

bleh.

Re:The Ubuntu

[arcade]

God I hate incompetent comments.

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?)

Uhm. The OS doesn't actually issue the command to the disk, you know. The disk has it's own defaults. And does the sanity stuff by itself. The OS however, might _overwrite_ those things, and ask the disk to "hey, behave more nicely, will you? I'm not interested in you burning out. Use these values instead you idiot.".

The more likely explanation is that the manufacturer set the defaults, but didn't notice that the values were unsafe because Windows ignores them.

If windows ignores them, the disk continues to do it - so no, no game for you.

Re:The Ubuntu

[kiddygrinder]

No, i think it's fair to call this an Ubuntu problem, i mean 80% of the stories about linux these days are simply titled "Ubuntu" when they would apply to any distro at all. It's only a natural progression to start calling your computer and all the parts therein an Ubuntu :)

Re:The Ubuntu

[gumbi west]

plus, for all we know, this is mostly atime updates.

it seems to me that in an increasingly laptop centric world, there would be lots of though going into reducing fsync calls and managing small writes in a memory cache that the HD doesn't even get told about.

Re:The Ubuntu

[Sancho]

Most hardware is in an uninitialized state when the computer boots. By extending your reasoning, that hardware shouldn't be touched either?

That's stupid. Linux (and operating systems in general) have mucked around with hardware since they were invented. Older versions of X would destroy monitors if they didn't apply sane defaults to the video card. And now, hard drives are destroying themselves when this stupid power mode turns on.

Re:The Ubuntu

[cheater512]

Sure granted this bug would occur on all Linux distros with a similar setup.

The thing is it would occur on all operating systems if they use a similar setup.
That means its hardware because its only a certain type of laptop with the issue.

Re:The Ubuntu

[SL Baur]

When I use a Windows laptop, I notice the hard disk spinning up on a fairly regular basis, even when I'm doing something fairly lame like web browsing or word processing. I would expect both of those two activities to access the disk. A web browser could be saving cache or saving a history file, or more likely, page faulting. Text editing I would expect to periodically write to an autosave file.

You could tune a notebook mode to eliminate most or all of the web browser disk accesses, turn off history, caching, swapping to disk, etc. However, especially with a notebook, you would want aggressive autosaving in case the battery suddenly dies.

Re:The Ubuntu

[zhenya00]

It applies in that case too. If the X device driver is killing monitors, then the driver needed to be rewritten to make sure that didn't happen. (Remember, the problem was with the X driver - now if there was a BIOS video setting that would cause this issue, regardless of installed OS, then that's different - but then it is truly not the fault of the OS...see?) This isn't a perfect analogy though - frying a monitor instantly is a very different situation than possibly, under some circumstances, increasing the number of load/unload cycles on a hard disk. In the latter case the drive is set to a perfectly acceptable state (and, coincidentally set to the state that I set all of my hard disks too, being concerned about noise - and I would not be happy if my OS suddenly started changing those settings) it is the higher level software that is causing the issue.

Re:The Ubuntu

[jcuervo]

Heck. I don't even know the manufacturers of the hard drives in my current PC (I bought them a couple years ago). Easy to find.

skull:~# hdparm -I /dev/sda | grep Model
Model Number: Hitachi HTS541680J9SA00
skull:~# grep Model: /proc/scsi/scsi
Vendor: ATA Model: Hitachi HTS54168 Rev: SB2O

I've had some ancient drives that didn't have brand names in the model numbers, though.

Re:The Ubuntu

[jcuervo]

But with Linux, you could make "Lapbuntu" that would contain a set of apps that were modified to aggressively avoid using the disk unless it's already spun up by patching existing software. What, like laptop mode?

Re:The Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

s/data/porn/

:-)

Re:The Ubuntu

[cmowire]

Almost, but not quite.

Laptop-mode solves the problem one way, without changing underlying apps, by making the write cycles bursty.

But what if you could receive a message to know that the drive had just spun up, so you could batch-commit a bunch of data and maybe do some speculative read operations?

Similarly, if you hit "Save" you really want to bypass any caching, you want it to spin up right now.

Not all disk operations are created equal.

Re:The Ubuntu

[Rogerborg]

God I hate incompetent comments.

Then you must be a real masochist to keep hanging around here.

Re:The Ubuntu

[gumbi west]

I don't understand, the B option is for how aggressive to be in power save. When you set it to one, you are saying, "treat electricity like its water in a desert." Locking after every read or write would be the best response to this, in my opinion. Why not back off from one a little?

Re:The Ubuntu

[cygonik]

Yes, it is a default set by the manufacturer. The problem is that Ubuntu touches the hard drive on a regular basis, causing the just-parked head to unpark.

Re:The Ubuntu

[LiquidCoooled]

Where do you draw the line though?

you can't get a better source than the horses' mouth.

If the hardware itself says that "X is good" then who are we to argue?

Re:The Ubuntu

[westcoast philly]

Wow. Settle down there, son.

Okay, all he's saying is that the OS can override DEFAULT power management settings, not issue the commands to park... which is exactly what you said, albeit rather childishly paraphrased. Otherwise, how is it a DEFAULT value, rather than The Only Frickin Choice?

The ignoring bit, you seem to have misunderstood. By ignoring the manufacturer's default power saving options and overwriting them with the OS's more relaxed values, the hard drive is NOT parking itself every 5 minutes. The QA testers may not even notice the obsessive parking because windows is overwriting the default values that they themselves are trying to test.
There are APM settings you can configure in windows, too. You know in Power Options Properties? Where it says: Turn off disks after...

Does THAT make sense to you?

Oh, and what kebes posted... was a comment. Nothing less, nothing more. He was not stating this as fact by any means. In fact, he even said "The comments in the bug report speculate that Windows either completely ignores ..." He's COMMENTING on a SPECULATION... and you interpret this as him stating fact?

Allow me to quote Google:

Definitions of comment on the Web:
- remark: a statement that expresses a personal opinion or belief; "from time to time she contributed a personal comment on his account"

So "God I hate incompetent comments." is probably one of the most incompetent, and thusly ironic, comments I've heard in years. well... besides anything that's come out of GWB's gob.

Now for the disclaimer. I didn't RTFA, and I don't have any degrees or anything besides some standard CompTIA and MS certs that any monkey can get with the proper study guides and a few hundred bucks. However, I DO understand a tiny bit about how some of the world operates, and this makes sense to me. So please, make this world a better place and don't crap on someone because they offer an opinion, thought, or even a Comment!

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.

Re:The Ubuntu

[Suhas]

>The problem is that Ubuntu touches the hard drive on a regular basis
I knew Ubuntu was doing something dirty!

Re:The Ubuntu

[Nullav]

Regardless, it's no reason to leave the problem alone and screw over the user for the fault of someone else (whoever that may be). Surely it wouldn't be too hard to count cycles and automatically disable APM (and maybe show an explanation for disabling it) if too many load cycles occur in a set period of time.

Re:The Ubuntu

[afroborg]

I would say more likely, if the values involved cause lower power usage, and are known to be overwritten by Windows anyway, that the HDD manufacturers are using the aggressive values which they know will cause short disk life so that they can claim lower power usage in their data sheets, and know that the drive will actually last because Windows overwrites the values in question anyway. Because the non-windows market is of no concern to them in the laptop segment.

All this assumes that windows actually DOES overwrite said values with something else though.

Re:The Ubuntu

[killjoe]

You were able to load ubuntu on a 9400? I could not even get the livecd to come up.

I bet you don't have the ATI card.

Fucking dell. No two laptops are alike even if they are same model.

Re:The Ubuntu

[crush]

According to Fedora Weekly News Alan Cox and others say that it's definitely down to how the BIOS is set to handle things and that's the same on Ubuntu, Fedora and Windows.

Re:The Ubuntu

[kauttapiste]

Oh come on guys, quit mocking about! Can we start blaming this on ol' Micro$oft already?

Re:The Ubuntu

[TractorBarry]

So in other words by respecting the manufacturers settings Ubuntu has helped diagnose a hardware settings problem.

Come on peeps where's a good spin doctor when you need them ? Surely the article should have been "Ubuntu so great it even helps hard drive manufacturer detect faulty settings" :)

This is Slashdot after all !

Re:The Ubuntu

[smilindog2000]

I do have the ATI card, and I had the same problem with Feisty Fawn. However, with a Google search, I found a work around. The problem's gone in Gutsy Gibbon. However, I agree... it's a PITA to install any linux distro when the machines are all different, and the supplier doesn't even care about BIOS bugs unless they effect Windows. On the other hand, things are changing. Dell has inspired ATI to properly support their linux driver, and they actually heard their linux users when they fixed their Dimension E521 BIOS back in January. The new relationship between Dell and Ubuntu seems to be slowly bringing industry support to a reasonable level. I'm actually pushing Dell for clients who want good Linux support on desktops (HP for servers).

Re:The Ubuntu

[MECC]

Lubuntu? Oh dear.

Ubuntu with Linux? What's so bad about that? Oh wait - you meant Ubuntu for lefties - that's just wrong.

Re:The Ubuntu

[cygonik]

"Good Touch / Bad Touch" :-)

Re:The Ubuntu

[TheCarp]

Does that mean we caught it spinning dirty?

-Steve

Re:The Ubuntu

[TheCarp]

I think I agree with ya here.

The thing is, Ubuntu is a Linux distro, Linux comes from the world of Unix. Unix comes from the world of big honkin systems that are expected to be on all the time and going.

Spin down disks to conserve power? what are you, a facilities manager? You don't spin down disks, you install another PDU and A/C unit and leave us alone! Right?

Kidding of course, I think our facilities manager would come kick my ass if he saw this post :)

anyway the problem is "built in". It seems to me like this needs to be built down into the filesystem. So when the disk is put into "ultra low power mode" the system should increase the disk cache and sync the disk a lot less often. Maybe it should try to opportunistically sync... try to wait "forever" (or as long as is feasible by some measure of cache size) and sync only when the disk is already spun up for some other reason (like a disk access that isn't a cached sector)

Of course, maybe the filesystem doesn't even see that, and you need to build that down into the LVM? Perhaps different parts of the filesystem could have different sync priorities... so a change in / or /home might prompt an immediate sync.... a /var/log/.. entry may not (/var/log is far less important on laptops anyway)

Guess you could enforce it at the block device level... just have it block until its internal timer times out (or enough attempts queue up... or either) before it asks the disk to spin back up?

-Steve

Re:The Ubuntu

[vikrant82]

More on this here , http://kakku.wordpress.com/

Re:The Ubuntu

[It doesn't come easy]

If you guys are talking about LCD monitor problems (not being able to boot the Live CD with a graphical interface), I have the same problem with my Sony SZ650N/C with an nVidia card. Feisty Fawn drops to the command line interface with the error that it cannot start the x-server (or something to that effect) and it's gone with Gutsy Gibbon as well. I think someone introduced a bug in Feisty Fawn that got fixed.

Re:The Ubuntu

[killjoe]

Unfortunately I am still having the same problem with gutsy.

Crap.

Re:The Ubuntu

[Jeruvy]

Quite insightful and you elude to the real problem....


Who defines sanity?

Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

but Ubuntu [...] may be dramatically shortening the life of your laptop's hard drive due to an aggressive power-saving feature I always thought that Gibbon was just a bit too gutsy!

wow, I had Ubuntu kill a laptop hard drive . . .

[proclivity76]

Might have been coincidence, but I did have it happen.

no problem, really!

[loafula]

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

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

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.

Re:no problem, really!

[computational super]

the money I saved not buying Vista!

You mean you got a refund from the laptop manufacturer? Otherwise, Microsoft has your money.

Re:no problem, really!

[EdelFactor19]

Although in some form I agree with you I'm not sure how far the trolling goes.... besides how many Laptop hard drives have hundreds of gigs of data? I've never had one that was more than 120 gig, most sold and which I encounter are 80. Yes there are larger, but I know at my workplace the corporate issue thinkpads are all on the 80gig mark; the t42p's and the t60p's.

Why is this pertinent? These are the same laptops that many college students end up with. A large amount of them have deals with ibm and now lenovo, I know RPI did and still does, I still have my 2002 t30 (third hard drive, one factory dead in 2002, one manual replaced in 2006 post warranty acts as a gentoo MythPVR sitting ontop of my cable box), and my 2004 t42 (first 80g motor died within a year, made fulltime switch to linux on it in 2006, drive got corrupted in early 07 but is back up and mostly ok although after 4 replacements of the plastic palm area from cracking the latest bunch well after warranty its days may be numbered as well). Seems odd that my ancient although somewhat upgraded (256 extra ram to get up to 512, a 120gig, 300 gig and 400 gig hard drive replacing the 40 gig drive) dell '00 XPS 1ghz desktop is outliving both of them. Granted I stopped using it for FPS and started using it almost exclusively as a linux file server (that dual boots / physical vm's into windowsXP for use of my OmniIO/Delta66 digital recording interface [i.e. one of those drives is exclusively for the resulting midi, wav and project files]) but still seems sorta odd.

back to my main point, I'd also question whether you can buy 4 laptop hd's for the price of vista and I'm by all means for sticking it to MS. Desktop hd's are heading to the ramen price segment but laptop ones are still fairly costly. More importantly there is more to the cost than just swapping the drive out and putting a new one in.. we arent talking about some random data drive that is a brainless copy over. this is the primary hard drive for a laptop and 9/10 people (if not worse) don't have a connector to connect a laptop HD to a desktop or a second laptop and thereby copy one drives contents over to another. Its bad enough to replace the batteries on laptops as frequently as we do, but ahard drive as well? not such a good sign. If these were failing desktop drives it would be more surprising but almost less important; throw raid, cheap drives and a usb enclosure at it and problem solved.

I'll concede your main point but instead of your answer, i'd simply rescind it to +3 or so :-)
lets save the flogging for whoever really is behind this

Re:no problem, really!

[osu-neko]

You mean you got a refund from the laptop manufacturer? Otherwise, Microsoft has your money.

That doesn't follow. I didn't buy Vista with my laptop, nor did I get any sort of Vista refund from the manufacturer (Apple), but I'm still pretty sure Microsoft doesn't have my money.

Re:no problem, really!

[darkmeridian]

Or you're a law school student with a laptop you keep notes on and then you write a 50 page thesis on it and then drop it or lose it. This happens a lot too, dude.

Re:no problem, really!

[metlin]

Modded a troll for stating a personal opinion? Gee.

Let's see - two operating systems. One could potentially harm your hard-disk (due to perhaps fault on the manufacturer, but harm nevertheless) and the other couldn't. See the obvious choice?

Sure, there's a fix, and that's great - but what about the harm that's already been done? Also, Some of us do not necessarily have the time to spend tweaking out and find ways around every bug that is there (and Windows has plenty, but hey - you can always get the company to compensate for their mistakes).

And good luck getting your warranty - if your s/w is partly responsible for the failure, they'll do everything possible to deny you the warranty. And good luck trying to tell IT about it, too.

-shakes head-

Re:no problem, really!

[Brian Gordon]

No, Ubuntu is using acpi to actually send load/unload signals several times per minute. The hard drive is just obeying the OS.

Re:no problem, really!

[Trenchbroom]

This is EXACTLY what happened to me. I had two Hitachi hard drives fail in my one-year-old Dell E1505. One came brand new with the computer, and one as the refurbished replacement under warranty. Both made a very steady "clicking" sound every 30-60 seconds right up until they failed. Also when I powered down the system the hard drive would make a very loud click sound upon shutoff. I read a thread on Ubuntu's forums that the clicking sound at shutoff was due to a flaw in 6.10 and 7.04 and that 7.10 would fix the problem. So when I received my Fujitsu refurb drive from Dell I decided not to install Ubuntu until 7.10 came out. Right after 7.10 came out the newsgroups started referring to the problem listed above. I ran the check to see what my cycle numbers were on this new hard drive--less then 3000 cycles with a usage of over two months. I completely believe that the Hitachi drives are too agressive with their settings and that the Fujitsu drive does not have the same problem.

Re:no problem, really!

[petermgreen]

and Windows has plenty, but hey - you can always get the company to compensate for their mistakes
has any end user ever sucesfully got MS to pay for thier fuckups?

And good luck getting your warranty - if your s/w is partly responsible for the failure, they'll do everything possible to deny you the warranty.
Yeah right, when you take a machine in with a failed hard drive they aren't exactly going to be able to tell what OS was on it before it failed are they?

Re:no problem, really!

[metlin]

and Windows has plenty, but hey - you can always get the company to compensate for their mistakes

has any end user ever sucesfully got MS to pay for thier fuckups?

I wasn't talking about MS - I was talking about having the company that you work for compensate you for screwing up your work laptop.

And good luck getting your warranty - if your s/w is partly responsible for the failure, they'll do everything possible to deny you the warranty.

Yeah right, when you take a machine in with a failed hard drive they aren't exactly going to be able to tell what OS was on it before it failed are they?

Obviously you've not had to work with IT schmucks that ask you stupid questions.

Prevent damage??

[kusanagi374]

Yeah, sure. Whatever it is, it can't be compared to the damage done to Ubuntu's launchpad after it was slashdotted.

Once they control the fire and get the backup server online, maybe I'll be able to RTFA. :(

Thanks for slashdotting launchpad, guys.

[Benanov]

I just got two Thinkpads at auction I wanted to put Ubuntu on. Launchpad is hit so hard I can't even subscribe to the bug to search for potential workarounds or better settings. :(

Re:Thanks for slashdotting launchpad, guys.

[ChicoLance]

I've got a Thinkpad T42 with Ubuntu Gutsy on (and have had earlier versions), and although I haven't gotten to the article yet, Ubuntu seems to work very well on my laptop.

Re:Thanks for slashdotting launchpad, guys.

[FudRucker]

here is a good workaround: http://www.debian.org/

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.

Re:Thanks for slashdotting launchpad, guys.

[vosester]

I have a much better Workaround just open a terminal and type "sudo apt-get new hdd from better manufacturer" works like a charm

Re:Thanks for slashdotting launchpad, guys.

[darkwhite]

The spindowns are not the problem! -B 1 causes many drives to wait a very short time before unloading the heads off the platter and onto the ramp. But the OS sends read/write requests to the hdd every few seconds, unless laptop mode is enabled. The drive then must load the heads again, service the request, unload them, etc. every few seconds. This is not as bad as spin-up cycles, but very bad nonetheless.

Re:Thanks for slashdotting launchpad, guys.

[stevied]

Is there any advantage to parking heads without spinning down? Shock protection?

Re:Thanks for slashdotting launchpad, guys.

[Obsidian Butterfly]

sudo apt-get new hdd from better manufacturer

package "new hdd from better manufacturer" depends on "more money" but it does not seem to be available.

Re:Thanks for slashdotting launchpad, guys.

[darkwhite]

Yes. When the head is on the ramp and the shock is strong enough that it would have slammed the head into the platter, collapsing the air cushion, damage to the track and head can be avoided. That requires a fairly strong shock though, like a laptop falling off the table, and many laptops already have protection against that scenario (HDAPS).

To me, the biggest annoyance with this bug (which after further reading does seem to be a BIOS default settings bug) is the constant clicking sounds the hard drive makes as it load cycles the heads.

Re:Thanks for slashdotting launchpad, guys.

[vosester]

sudo apt-cache search

AHA! :D

[Killjoy_NL]

That's why I use windows. So I don't have to wonder who the culprit is ;)

^_^

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.

Re:AHA! :D

[Killjoy_NL]

Heh,actually, buying Windows Vista solved a problem I'd been having, random reboots during WoW and only WoW under xp. No blue screens nothing, just poof death and hey look, I have 2gb of ram wheeeeeeeeee.

Well, after buying Vista (was only +/- 18 euros since I work for an educational institution) I got a reboot too, after a nice blue screen. Best part about Vista for me is, it shows the info from the blue screen next time you boot up. I googled the error, did a little digging and it turns out 1 bios setting was wonky.
The one that clocks the cpu back if it thinks you don't need performance.
After turning that off, I never had the problem to this day.

So in all honesty, Vista works fine for me (I know it doesn't for others) and it was dirt cheap to boot :)

Re:AHA! :D

[HunterZ]

You can set XP to show a bluescreen instead of just rebooting. I'm guessing you had it set to just reboot instead.

Re:AHA! :D

[Killjoy_NL]

I know that, it's one of the first things I configure after I install XP on a system (that and turning off sounds and turning off the annoying error messages except the fatal ones).

Windows Sysadmin here :)
(this will not make myself some friends here ;)

Re:AHA! :D

[AP2k]

Then you should have enabled BSODs:

By default when WinXP encounters a system failure, it reboots without warning. The setting that controls this can be changed:
Control Panel/System/Advanced/Settings (Startup & Recovery)/System Failure/Uncheck-Automatically Restart. To view the event log: Administrative Tools/Event Viewer or Start/Run/eventvwr.To bypass the BSOD altogether and enable the instant "Auto Reboot" feature: Start/Run/Regedit http://kellys-korner-xp.com/win_xp_restart.htm

Re:AHA! :D

[Killjoy_NL]

read my other reply in the thread, already did that :)

Re:AHA! :D

[tha_mink]

Wait a minute! You're a Windows sysadmin and you said this...

Heh,actually, buying Windows Vista solved a problem I'd been having, random reboots during WoW and only WoW under xp. No blue screens nothing, just poof death and hey look, I have 2gb of ram wheeeeeeeeee. Well, after buying Vista (was only +/- 18 euros since I work for an educational institution) I got a reboot too, after a nice blue screen. Best part about Vista for me is, it shows the info from the blue screen next time you boot up. I googled the error, did a little digging and it turns out 1 bios setting was wonky. How can you be a sysadmin and NOT know that you could have been doing the same thing with XP? And if you DID know, then why didn't you do the same thing when you were in XP? Doesn't sound like you're a very good sysadmin.

Re:AHA! :D

[Killjoy_NL]

Well, since XP didn't give me the bsod (and yes I turned off autoreboot), I didn't have much to go on, stripped the pc to its barebones, and still had the issue.
Since I already bought Vista (bought it cheaply earlier since I was thinking about leaving my employer, can't beat that price unless you go to the piracy place, something I was kind of tired of) I thought I'd give it a try (to make sure it wasn't an incompatibility/error in XP) and lo and behold, the cause was found.

(btw, dutch guy here, so my spelling or grammar could be a tad bit off)

Re:AHA! :D

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

You're a Windows sysadmin ...

Doesn't sound like you're a very good sysadmin.

Gasp!

Re:AHA! :D

[Killjoy_NL]

Thanks for the compliment, I'll see what I can do about the parentheses :)

Re:AHA! :D

[DMUTPeregrine]

(Define (Lambda (Native (Lisp (speakers (love (parentheses.))))))) (Yes, I know, I should have used Cons to build the sentence as a list and output that...)

Re:AHA! :D

[Jeff Carr]

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

If you're wondering that, it's the power supply...

Re:AHA! :D

[kurokaze]

If you're a windows sys admin then you MUST know about driver verifier right? right?

Re:AHA! :D

[Killjoy_NL]

Drivers weren't the problem :)

Re:AHA! :D

[Khaed]

Just don't tone it back too much and start writing long sentences without punctuation.

Re:AHA! :D

[AntiDragon]

For future reference: The result of a stop screen error can be found in XP's system log. The reason you weren't getting anything is that XP (rather sneakily) defaults to automatically re-booting on a STOP error instead of just halting and giving you dump screen. You can change this behaviour in System Properties>Error Recovery. And if you want real deep diagnostics, use the debugging tools and check out the DMP files (memory dumps) produced by each re-boot. Short story - XP *does* have all the info, it's just in a different place. I won't comment on your choosing to switch to Vista - I have to go make movies on my Mac now....

Re:AHA! :D

[Killjoy_NL]

I appreciate all the helpful hints everybody dropped, but I DID!! turn off auto reboot to try and produce the BSOD I wanted (the irony, it's delicious) but I didn't get it.
Read my other comments here for a bit more info

^_^

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.

Re:Ubuntu?

[darkwhite]

It's Ubuntu only, though perhaps Debian too. The acpi-support package is specific to them.

So what's new?

[TheBrutalTruth]

OpenSuse 10.2 does to, without some tweaking. I'd wager other distros have the same or similar issue. I love *nix, but it it not ready for primetime yet, with bugs like that. I shudder to think of the call from my old man, where I have to explain that he has to rebuild (like he could of in the first place) his PC with pci=nomsi and acpi=forceirqpoll in the boot options so his high dollar toy isn't ruined.

Re:So what's new?

[Anonymous Coward]

I love *nix, but it it not ready for primetime yet

... unix isnt ready for primetime?

Re:So what's new?

[Mattsson]

As you might have seen in the other posts, etc, it isn't a *nix bug.
It's a firmware "feature" in most 2.5" drives that needs a OS workaround.

But I take your point. Most unix-derivates aren't really ready to be used by the general public unless they can accept the default low-level system settings.

But neither is Windows, really. Hacking around the registry or changing boot-loader-options, etc, isn't something most people should do either.

Re:So what's new?

[rmerry72]

I love *nix, but it it not ready for primetime yet, with bugs like that. I shudder to think of the call from my old man, where I have to explain that he has to rebuild (like he could of in the first place) his PC with pci=nomsi and acpi=forceirqpoll in the boot options so his high dollar toy isn't ruined.

At least you can change it in Linux. In Windows you either can't outright, or its a tricky registry "fix" that might bring your hole machine down.

Tell your old man when he calls that as its a Windows box he has no chance of him - or you - fixing it and he should just throw his high dollar toy out the window and get another one. That's the Windows fix.

A lot of Windows users say Linux ain't for primetime because when something breaks or you want to tweak you have to go to the command line or tweak a little script. That power is apparantly "bad". At least Linux gives you the ability to tweak and fix it.

With Windows you just throw it out and get a new one. Guess what - if you want, you can do that with Linux too.

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:That's not what I'm worried about

[jwsmith00]

So long as you have the correct video drivers, you should be able to do all of that. For Ubuntu 7.04, it was just a matter of downloading the NVidia drivers, installing them, and then you are able to run multiple displays. For Ubuntu 7.10, the most recent NVidia driver is already installed, so everythings good to go out of the box. However, Ubuntu 7.10, my laptop runs extremely hot, so I'm sticking with 7.04.

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???

Re:Old news???

[cuby]

it's even worse than that: http://paul.luon.net/journal/hacking/BrokenHDDs.html The article is from Nov. 25, 2005!

Re:Old news???

[cygonik]

Hopefully not long. I've been waiting forever for it to be fixed. Granted, workarounds work, but I don't want to have to check for the necessity of a workaround (and implement the workaround) every time I install Ubuntu.

Re:Old news???

[Zwaxy]

Someone moderated this as 'troll' for describing his experience? My experience is exactly the same.

Re:wow, I had Ubuntu kill a laptop hard drive . .

[LingNoi]

Same here. I had my Hitachi Hard drive that came with the laptop die. Not was if it was the OS though.

Re:That's not what I'm worried about

[elrous0]

Didn't work for 7.04 on my system even after I installed the nvidia driver. Haven't tried 7.10.

Effects on Dell/Ubuntu OEM?

[kusanagi374]

I wonder what is the effect of this bug on officially endorsed and supported Dell notebooks with Ubuntu on them? Wouldn't something like this be caught up by Dell's QA? Or is it exclusive to 7.10?

Re:Effects on Dell/Ubuntu OEM?

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Since the bug is over a year old, I doubt is exclusive to 7.10.

I will imagine that Dell will shorten the warantee on their drives and make more money replacing them. At least until people get pissed.

Re:Effects on Dell/Ubuntu OEM?

[slack_prad]

The bug has been tagged to all supported ubuntu releases.

Re:Effects on Dell/Ubuntu OEM?

[internetcommie]

Considering the HD failure rate on Dell laptops, I doubt anybody will notice a difference.

Re:Effects on Dell/Ubuntu OEM?

[rucs_hack]

My dell laptop lasted for seven years....

Ok, then it almost burned a hole in my carpet when it died, but apart from that it was good.

I also have a Dell OpenMosix cluster made up of by four pc's that are approximately five years old. Not one single problem has occurred with them, ever, I haven't had to reboot them for over a year, and that was just because we moved them to a new server room.

Re:Effects on Dell/Ubuntu OEM?

[internetcommie]

Hmmm... "Karma-Bonus Modifier +1"

With luck like that I'd think you should get at least +3!

Re:Effects on Dell/Ubuntu OEM?

[cyphergirl]

Meanwhile, I toasted four hard drives (all different brands) within 3 years in my spiffy Dell tower. My husband and I built another box about a year ago with SATA drives and I lost the secondary one in the first 9 months.

We're thinking that my photography habit ^H^H^H^H^H business is keeping them working a bit too hard, so now I try to archive everything off of the drives onto other media as often as is reasonable. Funny thing that is.... 160GB drives cost less than a pack of ramen noodles, and I have to make sure I keep them less than 75% full otherwise they give up the ghost.

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?

Re:This thread sucks...

[jmorris42]

> 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.

Of course, because all laptops are DESIGNED for Windows so if it doesn't work abuse and ridicule should be heaped on them if it was hitting multiple hardware vendors with the only common factor the OS vendor.

But this case is tricky. I just read through the thread and most people there are paniced sheep just turning off all power management because they don't EVER want the hdd to unload. They don't understand the three year replacement cycle all PC hardware is designed around, it is BUILT to FAIL. Looks like there IS a problem of some sort though because some people are reporting unload followed almost instantly by a load. But power management remains one of the areas of PCs that vary wildly in totally undocumented ways not only from vendor to vendor and model to model but from minor BIOS revisions. It is a non-trivial problem.

Re:This thread sucks...

[PrescriptionWarning]

well actually it is linux and perhaps even OSX, as whats happening is that linux is merely using the default setting on the Hard drive, therefore the manufacturer is setting it, most likely in anticipation that the OS (windows) will change it anyway.

its all really just a big foam finger blame pointing game

Re:This thread sucks...

[geminidomino]

Does that mean that Vista is for Masochistic Submissives?
FreeBSD is for exhibitionists?
Redhat is for Missionary-only-for-reproduction prudes?

Re:This thread sucks...

[calebt3]

homasexuals That little dotted red line under that word after you typed it? It wasn't formatting like Bold and Italicize.

Re:This thread sucks...

[pandrijeczko]

Ubuntu is for homasexuals>

It's probably not for you, either. Since you can't spell "homosexuals" correctly, I wouldn't recommend you try commands like "man" or "ls" in case you get those wrong also.

Perhaps it time to scribble "My First Speak And Spell Computer" in crayon on the bottom of your Christmas list and mail it to your parents so they get in time for their annual visit to you at the "School For The Gifted".

Re:This thread sucks...

[FigTree]

Maybe the AC thinks Ubuntu users want to have sex with aHoma?

Re:This thread sucks...

[jmorris42]

> PCs shouldn't be BUILT to FAIL.

Yea and I want a pony. I never said I agree with it, just that it is reality. And in this case it isn't even something where you can have both. You either spin up/down to gain battery life at the expense of accelerated component wear or you trade battery runtime for longer life. I'm currently using a four old Thinkpad but it spends most of it's time on a dock so it isn't something I have to worry about as much. But yes,in the general case I'd swap hard drive lifespan for longer battery life. Hell, a three year old hard drive can be replaced for $100US most of the time or pop a little more and get a bigger one that didn't even exist when the machine was originally built.

By five years though everything in a laptop is getting long in the tooth and if it isn't a top quality machine (Thinkpads, etc.) mechanical problems are usually setting in that aren't practical to repair.

We aren't likely to get off the hardware treadmill until we solve the software one. Is there a good goddamned reason why a modern Fedora can't even be installed on a machine with 'only' 256MB? Or why 512MB isn't good enough for RHEL5? Not just picking on RH here, just more familiar with their offerings.

Re:This thread sucks...

[Vexorian]

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?

Maybe they know that it is Linux, and not just ubuntu and an old version of the Linux kernel... Gutsy's kernel is not with this flaw anymore...

Re:This thread sucks...

[petermgreen]

Not just picking on RH here, just more familiar with their offerings.
You should try some other distros, I started to feel that fedora was bloated before I had even finished my first install of it when I discovered that FC6 required 3 CDs to install even a basic system and FC7 dropped CD distribution altogether.

Install something like debian or ubuntu and consider picking a desktop environment that is less bloated than KDE/GNOME (such as XFCE or even ICEWM).

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:Selected Excerpts

[tchuladdiass]

The main problem is a combination of the short spindown time, and something wanting to write out to the drive every 30 seconds or so. The main culprit could be the fact that by default, a files last access time (atime) gets updated on every read, even if that read comes from cache. So when the drive is spun down, it gets spun up even on cached reads (to write out the atime).
Add "-o noatime" to the filesystems in /etc/fstab, and that should clear up the issue.

Re:Selected Excerpts

[SEAL]

The main problem is a combination of the short spindown time, and something wanting to write out to the drive every 30 seconds or so.

First, my perspective: yes, I had a laptop drive die while running an older version of Ubuntu. I'm not sure if the problem is still present in current builds, though, as I haven't used it in awhile.

On to what I quoted -- one problem with the default Ubuntu setup is ext3. The system will periodically write out to the journal even when it is otherwise idle. This occurs even if you have noatime set in your fstab.

Re:Selected Excerpts

[Quadraginta]

I remember noticing this "feature" of ext3 when it first came out, and as a consequence I've held on to ext2 ever since. Probably that's a non-starter for servers and such, but for a personal computer it seems to work OK. The very rare fsck file repair needed when the power fails has never been a problem. No doubt someday the power will fail and the filesystem will be corrupted beyond repair, but, well (1) it hasn't happened to me yet in 10+ years of using Linux, and (2) that's what backup is for anyway.

Re:Selected Excerpts

[skintigh2]

Not to defend any sloppy programming or unnecessary ware on hardware, but is this really that big of an issue?

At that rate, it will take you 8571.4 hours to hit that limit. For an evening user like me, even at 4 hours a day every day that's 2142.9 days, or 5.87 years. I'm used to Maxtors dying after 3 or so years, and my Seagates are usually obsolete (or dropped) in that amount of time, and that's on a desktop. I'm assuming not many laptops survive 6 years at all, or at least are used regularly that long.

Even a road warrior using it 60 hours a week would take 2.6 years, and it hasn't been my experience that laptops survive long with that kind of use.

PS: this article really should have been called "Ubuntu considered harmful"

Re:Selected Excerpts

[darkwhite]

It's really annoying when the drive clicks every five seconds or so. That's the main problem for me (my laptop is affected by this issue).

Re:Selected Excerpts

[cygonik]

For someone whose laptop is their primary system, it's not quite the same. I lost a HD when the bug was new, just because I didn't notice the park/unpark click. When it went, I figured (since I'd gotten the laptop used) that it was just natural wear. Half a year later, I figured it out (during the last part of the life of my second hd) -- yeah, it took me a while. But I contributed to the bug report what I could, and then watched it stagnate. ..it sucks, knowing that the stance is basicly "won't fix, not our deal," and that in the meantime quite a few people are going to lose HD's to the issue. Not the end of the world, but somewhat disheartening.

Someone eventually submitted it to digg some time ago, and pewf! Attention, and probably a fix relatively shortly. I love Ubuntu, but there are communications issues here.

Re:Selected Excerpts

[JaredOfEuropa]

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/

Fine.... now explain this to my mum.

Re:Selected Excerpts

[Cato]

Grandparent comment is low scoring, but the important issue is that waking up the hard disk frequently is a cause of load/unload cycles, and (1) Ubuntu and most Linux distros use ext3 and (2) ext3 by default writes journal data every 5 seconds. However, it looks like Laptop Mode Tools, now used by Ubuntu, modifies the ext3 commit options: http://samwel.tk/laptop_mode/faq - and it's easy enough to use "commit=N" to set the ext3 journal commit time to say 30 or even 90 seconds. When combined with noatime and avoiding fsync, this should help in reducing hard disk spinups.

Re:Selected Excerpts

[Zwaxy]

My last laptop died running Ubuntu Feisty. It was 'ticking' every 5 seconds (with the default settings - I didn't edit any /etc/ file, or enable laptop mode). I also mostly ran it off the mains, not the battery.

At one cycle every 5 seconds, the drive will reach its expected limit of 600k cycles in
600000 / (60/5) / 60 / 24 = 34.7 days.

The drive actually lasted for 2 months, but I did switch the laptop off sometimes.

The drive was replaced under the manufacturer's guarantee, and now I've disabled APM using the 'hdparm -B 255' trick, which has stopped the madness.

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

Re:Not Entirely Accurate

[FranTaylor]

The comment in the file is misleading (there are other problems!), which is a bug all by itself. Just because it's not the default doesn't mean that people don't do it. Doesn't it say somewhere, "If you have a laptop, set ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE"?

It is Entirely Accurate that this is a Bug.

Re:Not Entirely Accurate

[marcantonio]

Doesn't it say somewhere, "If you have a laptop, set ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE"?

No, it doesn't.

It is Entirely Accurate that this is a Bug.

You're right it is a bug. But saying that Ubuntu is trashing your HD is a gross exaggeration.

Re:Not Entirely Accurate

[FranTaylor]

Funny, I googled for ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE on ubuntu.com and I find all kinds of places where they tell you to turn it on.

Re:Not Entirely Accurate

[cygonik]

> 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:

Not accurate, or at least, not accurate in all cases. By default, some hardware manufacturers have aggressive apm settings. This would be essentially Ok, but Ubuntu touches the HD on a regular basis - thus, whenever the HD parks, it immediately unparks.

Re:Not Entirely Accurate

[embsysdev]

If it shouldn't be set, then it shouldn't be an option. This is a bug. It was (presumably) enabled by the OEM on my laptop (I know I didn't change it) and I'm clocking over 97000 for a 1-year-old laptop that sees only very light use on the weekends.

Read some of the Ubuntu forums

[bluefrogcs]

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

Much as I love debian

[Nursie]

I can't get the bugger to install on my new Vaio SZ

It just kinda sits there and hangs during install. Which is a shame as I love the debian OS in general.

Re:Much as I love debian

[cortana]

Please file a bug against the 'installation-reports' package.

http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch05s03.html.en#problem-report

Re:Much as I love debian

[FudRucker]

try something other than debian or ubuntu or just as long as it is not debian based then, maybe slackware or if you feel like doing some work Crux is a good distro that forces all users to build their own kernel and has a ports system similar to gentoo without all the gentoo annoyances like extensive USE flags (already configured for i686)...

Re:Much as I love debian

[Nursie]

Ubuntu has installed just fine, I'm using it now. I shall be investigating this hard disk thing though.

I wonder if it affects hybrid drives as badly...

Re:Much as I love debian

[Nursie]

That's a good idea, I shall do so. (after checking to see if it's already been reported).

Re:Much as I love debian

[It doesn't come easy]

Could you be more specific...exactly what bugger wouldn't install?

Re:May be FUD, but it happened to me

[baadger]

I installed Ubuntu about 2 weeks ago, and somehow the installation screwed up my hard drive completely...*snip* At the time, I figured it was GRUB that had done it, but according to this news, it was Ubuntu.

Even assuming this bug effected you 2 weeks ago and taking it to its maximum impact this bug still probably wouldn't have killed your drive in such a short time. My immediate suspicion is a faulty drive.

How exactly is the drive hosed?

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:Cheap test..

[jnik]

That's in package smartmontools (at least in feisty), for those who don't want to go searching...

Re:Cheap test..

[PitaBred]

It's the same name in Gutsy

Re:Cheap test..

[isorox]

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

My laptop is about 6 months old, but you'd never guess it

193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 095 095 000 Old_age Always - 590759365028

Also
    9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 096 096 000 Old_age Always - 21865678632180
That's 2.5 billion years

Re:That's not what I'm worried about

[Cryophallion]

The new screens and graphics control panel is added to gnome so that you can now do this out of the box.
It shows two screens, and you can dual screen it or switch screens from the control panel. You may have to restart X for changes to take effect, however it is much better than it used to be. I had no problems selecting the right resolution for my computer (1280x1024).

AS for the hard drive throttling, that could be a serious issue, and one I am sure they will try to fix asap, especially with a Long Term Support version coming up next. They want that thing as bug free and stable as it can get, and something like this could hurt their rep. On the other hand, who's to say other OS's/distros aren't doing the same thing?

Maybe this explains

[ILongForDarkness]

All the bitching around my work about how hard drives used to last longer. With my limited cross section, I have 2 computers at home, both ca 1998, still running original hard drives, in fact I've obsoleted 6 workstations so far at home, none of them had hard drive failures, I had one PSU, one GPU, and one NIC failure. At work (mainly a IBM shop) I've had to replace about 20% of drives within 4 years (I admin 50 workstations). I realize there is a lot of variables, smaller read heads, faster spin rates etc, but it does seem that my old dinosaur home computers last longer than the newer PC's we have at work. I'd be curious if "power saving" is putting our data at risk.

Re:Maybe this explains

[colourmyeyes]

I think it's a crapshoot - I have a 1200Mb drive that was a hand-me-down to me; it's been spinning constantly for the past 5 or so years and just won't quit. Meanwhile a 160Gb drive I bought back when that was huge just completely died on me very few months later - no warning, nothing. It just didn't work one day. I have spun up old drives I've found in boxes of computer crap and they work no problem - I wonder if it's just that by the time they're old the faulty drives are "weeded out" (have already died) and I'm just seeing a good sample. Whatever, my experience has been that big, new drives have a high failure rate, and I'm not the only one to say that.

(yeah, I take my own sig to heart)

Re:Maybe this explains

[toddestan]

If you're IBM computers at work run IBM Deskstars for hard drives, I would say a 20% failure rate in 4 years is remarkably good.

Re:Maybe this explains

[ILongForDarkness]

Yep they are deskstars :) When they die (shh don't tell anyone :)) I replace them with 500 GB Seagate perpendicular write drives :) Problem fixed and another happy customer, hehe. Actually it makes sense, because by the time I'm done tinkering with them (we have several programs outside of the standard image, and every computer seems to have a unique set of programs), anyways with the rate I charge, there is 150-200 worth of labor into fixing it, so why not throw an extra 100 or so and bump the drive to a nice high performance one?

Re:Maybe this explains

[ILongForDarkness]

You might have something with the "bad ones already filtered out" concept. Things are spinning so fast (if you do the math 5"X7200rpmXpi is 107mph or 172kph) and the tolerences are so low that it doesn't take much to ruin the drive. With higher densities, we also have smaller read heads that have to be closer to the disk platter to get a good signal. Smaller = weaker, and closer = greater chance of a head crash, that probably has a lot to do with it. We might be approaching the physical limits of the little motors we spin the disks with. Presumably SATA drives should be able to go to 15k rpm at least (because SCSI's there already), but I'm not sure how much further we can go. Also, spinning faster isn't the real answer because it means you have to pump more energy into the drive to spin it up, increasing the energy costs, and mechanical systems are harder to get tight tolerences than electrical.

Probably bad harddrive firmware

[chrb]

Well, that Ubuntu bug report is over 1 year old, and according to ThinkWiki, and as confirmed by several people on the thinkpads.com forums, updating the harddrive firmware may well fix the problem.

Re:That's not what I'm worried about

[kjkeefe]

If you really have an nvidia card, you should try 7.10. They make installing the drivers a breeze. Once you have the nvidia driver installed, install nvidia-config and use it to setup your funky display options. It is a great tool put out by nVidia. I have a side-by-side dual monitor setup at home set up with 7.04 (moving to 7.10 soon) and it works like a charm. Kudos to nVidia!

Mandriva?

[haeger]

What about Mandriva? Does the bug affect them too?
Since my upgrade to Gutsy was less than smooth. I've got to reinstall the lot anyway and since Mandriva was a favourite of mine a few years back I might give them another go. I hear that they've cleaned up the mess they had back then.
So, how is it Mandriva guys. Do you also try to kill my HD or are you a safe (data)haven?

.haeger

Re:Mandriva?

[tot]

My laptop with Mandriva has almost 900k load cycles in 10 months, when using with battery less that 3 hours per day. Maybe I should start shopping a new drive... Changing the options in /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf to use apm mode 254 on battery seems to fix the issue.

Re:i hate to say this but:

[Rakishi]

Warranty means jack shit as you still need to deal with the annoyance of a dead hard drive. MY time is worth something and this is not how I want to spend it.

This includes:
-Downtime until you get a replacement
-Time to set up replacement back to the state of the old machine
-Annoyance of having to file warranty claim, package laptop and send it out (or drive to whatever local shop can do replacements)
-Bugs when replacement differs from old machine in negative ways (which you will of course be told is officially an "upgrade" or "current equivalent" so you can't complain even though to you its a major downgrade).
-Need to do constant hard drive images (and the space needed to store them). I think this requires a reboot which is annoying.
-Need to do constant backups to fill in holes if you can't image often enough.

MOD UP PLEASE (n/t)

[fritsd]

PP gives a plausible sounding solution.

Re:Blame Microsoft.

[EveryNickIsTaken]

Bravo. Now we just need someone to blame this on Bush, and everything is covered.

Re:May be FUD, but it happened to me

[number11]

installed Ubuntu about 2 weeks ago, and somehow the installation screwed up my hard drive completely... according to this news, it was Ubuntu.

No. (I haven't read TFA because it's still slashdotted, but...) Apparently the article says it cycles the power too quickly, which leads to premature failure. Not screwing the drive up immediately, but wearing it out too soon.

If the drive screwed up immediately upon installing Ubuntu in a dual boot with a copy of Windows that had been used some already, I'd put money on it being partition problems. Ubuntu installs nicely on a clean fresh system, but if Windows is there already and the existing drive data is too odd (fragmented, swap file fragmented and/or seriously separated from the rest of the data, multiple partitions, whatever) the repartitioning may not go well. The repartitioning software (I forget what it is) is not smart enough to stop and tell you "hey, you gotta clean this drive up before I make changes" (or to deal with doing the cleanup itself).

Saving Power Has a Cost

[Prototerm]

The aggressive power saving settings here are perhaps a little too aggressive, but did anyone really think you could do that totally without cost? This isn't magic, you know. It's a trade-off. If you tell your computer (usually in a laptop) to spin down the hard drives to save power, you're going to cause greater wear-and-tear on the things because each time they spin down, they have to spin back up before you can use them again. If you want to save energy without the wear, turn the bloody thing off when you're not using it.

What, you're in too much of a hurry to view the latest pr0n? Chill, dude, before you go blind!

If you run a desktop, it's doubtful you'll have a problem with this, as most desktop users turn power saving features off entirely (and yeah, I also drive a big honkin' SUV. Bite me), but be careful on a laptop. If your hard drive supports SMART, you can do a quick check of the numbers (I think the one you want is # 193, IIRC), and see if you're at risk. But not all drives support SMART (I have a laptop drive that doesn't), so as usual, YMMV.

Re:Saving Power Has a Cost

[archen]

As was pointed out, the key thing is that this is a default of the machine, not people necessarily tinkering with settings. This sounds much like a problem I had with FreeBSD on an Dell Inspiron where I had acpi completely disabled - if you plugged a battery into the machine it shut down, so acpi didn't buy me much as it was always plugged in anyway. But for some odd reason the drive would spin up, click, then spin down. Sometimes it would do this every 10-15 seconds or so. I used it for testing for quite a while until mysteriously it didn't spin up anymore. I saw that coming though since I figured all those spin-ups could NOT be good. So there you go, drive death with no acpi.

Another workaround for crap bugged hardware. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Re:Saving Power Has a Cost

[TheCarp]

>(and yeah, I also drive a big honkin' SUV. Bite me)

Actually, I only respond to requests for biting in limited context.

Instead I will joyously ride past you on my motorcycle getting 45 REAL MPG (as measured by fuel consumption not flawed emissions tests) and cheering every time gas prices go up.... I really hope to see $4/gallon as soon as possible.

Hell when that happens, my fuel costs will be a whopping $16 per tank! Good thing a tank lasts me a week.

-Steve

Re:Slashdot comment browsing is unusable

[The Iso]

Get an account and enjoy all the benefits which that entails.

Re:Blame Microsoft.

[plague3106]

Hey everyone, that troll Twitter is back! I was wondering when he'd turn up again.

Re:That's not what I'm worried about

[Hayden Panettiere]

I edited my xorg configuration file, and I'm just a girl! It's so easy that only a complete moron would have a problem with it.

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.

So Ubuntu can ruin hardware?

[Boojumbunn]

You know, it's funny. A while back there was an outcry about manufacturers who decided that installing linux nullified your warrenty. This incident makes me wonder if maybe they have a point? After all... they have likely tested the hardware for long term windows reliability. They probably haven't tested their hardware for long term Linux reliability (through all the various linux types and settings.)

That said, they could probably still support their warrenty on things they know won't be affected by operating systems, like the hinge of the laptops screen.

Boojum the brown bunny

Re:So Ubuntu can ruin hardware?

[AmazingRuss]

My first go with Ubuntu ( 4 or 5 revs back), managed to corrupt my CMOS settings somehow, and made it impossible to boot even into BIOS. Dell had enough docs out so I could find the CMOS reset jumper, but it was pretty scarey. Until then I didn't think it was possible for an OS to do something like this.

I could see manufactureres limiting support to windows or a few big distros, as it would be expensive to test for a bunch of different OSs.

Re:So Ubuntu can ruin hardware?

[hey!]

Or... if you don't know where the reset jumper is, you could take the battery off the mobo for a few minutes.

Y'know what was scary back in the day -- recompiling and installing a kernel on a $100,000 minicomputer, and hoping you didn't brick the thing because your company's operations would grind to a screeching halt. Oh, the procedure is documented, and you can always call for an emergency service call, but there's nothing like hundreds of people sitting on their hands waiting to make you look bad.

These days I can't be bothered to worry about killing a motherboard. The only thing that really matters is data. Even if I have a particularly fancy motherboard, it scarcely matters compared to my investment in my data. I just had a fan die on a laptop a couple of weeks ago, rather than panic because all my data was there, I popped out the HD, slapped it in an external USB enclosure, did an "extra" backup of the data and went on working, fixing the laptop at my leisure.

Never get attached to hardware, either logistically or emotionally. It's well on the way to being junk by the first time you use it. It's data, data, data that matters.

Re:So Ubuntu can ruin hardware?

[geekoid]

They should use either OS, they should base it on a strict industry standard all the time and use that as then number to judge lifetime by. There are two many variables to test it with an OS to determine lifetime read/writes.

Re:So Ubuntu can ruin hardware?

[Cato]

Ubuntu doesn't even write to your CMOS (and nor does Windows), so it's most likely this was a coincidental failure. Correlation does not mean causation.

Re:So Ubuntu can ruin hardware?

[AmazingRuss]

I figured out what caused it, and found the Dell docs, in a forum post where several people with the same model laptop had the same problem with Ubuntu.

It was a long time ago...that's about all I remember, and I have been running subsequent versions of Ubuntu without a hitch.

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:From the horses mouth

[Rogerborg]

The first five times he said "We don't fuck over your hard drive by default" I wasn't convinced, but on the sixth time, the cognitive dissonance really kicked in, and I forgot that Ubuntu recommends turning on ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE on laptops. So, OK, they don't fuck your hard drive over, they just give you the 14" spiked dildo and tell you to fuck it over yourself.

noatime by itself doesn't make a difference

[Krischi]

I have been running noatime for as long as I have been running Ubuntu and still had been seeing insanely high load cycle counts until I applied the hdparm -B fix. There is something else going on.

I'm not convinced

[pwizard2]

I've been running Ubuntu (since Edgy) on my laptop for about a year now with heavy use and my laptop works as well as it did on the day I got it. I known for awhile that having the "laptop mode" option enabled in /etc/default/acpi-support can be bad for your drive, but it is disabled by default.

Re:That's not what I'm worried about

[value_added]

When they fix it so I don't have to do complicated manual edits the xorg config file to get more than a lousy 1024×768 screen resolution and support for a projector or dual displays ...

And those "edits" are more complicated than the edits you typically make in your "letter to mom" wordprocessing document?

Geez.

Look, if you don't understand the format of xorg.conf, that's fine. Admit you don't know how things work. Admittedly, there's lots to know, but it can be simple or complicated, depending on the setup. On the other hand, lots of people will be happy to chip in and give you a fully working configuration you can copy and paste ... just like you would in your wordprocessing document. And if you're lucky, you might even be able to use your mouse and not hurt your fingers typing a few characters. ;-)

But offering this inflammatory indictment that everything is fucked up because something doesn't work for you strikes me as somewhere between immature and simply childish. And suggesting that support for a feature doesn't exist because you haven't discovered it, can't find it, can't be bothered to try, or refuse to bother learning for yourself is telling everyone you're someone who should be ignored.

Ubuntu, like any distro, is a work in progress up against the vagaries of hardware vendors. Lots of people in lots of disparate areas are offering their hard work. They deserve respect, irrespective of whether things work out of the box for a random Slashdot user. Multimonitor support? High resolutions? They work for me. What's *your* problem?

Next time, instead of brandishing your complaints, maybe take a more constructive approach. Say it didn't work for you. Admit you didn't try very much. Ask for help. You might be surprised at the response.

Friend

[Zashi]

I'll be your friend.
(IBM ServeRAID tester)
(I test mostly with Linux)
(Sometimes windows) :)

Re:Friend

[Killjoy_NL]

Wheeeeeeeee, I've got a friend.

Seriously though, Linux (in all/most its incarnations) is damn good.
Fast, stable and really usefull (sp?)

But I've always been a windows user, gamer, etc. It just doesn't do it for me, but that's ok, to each his own right?
  ^_^

FLASH!

[thanksforthecrabs]

Your hard drive also suffers wear and tear when you use the damn thing. Those who are going to panic over another "the sky is falling" post please move to the left.

Re:i hate to say this but:

[r_jensen11]

That doesn't solve the issue of not being able to access those documents you needed 5 hours ago because your hard drive crashed.

Yes, I know that you should have a redudancy system and save important documents multiple places. But the typical user doesn't know this.

Re:That's not what I'm worried about

[Stringer Bell]

Now let's all forget about this hard drive failure problem with a big bowl of strawberry ice cream!

What about iPods?

[scharkalvin]

Hard disk mp3 players like iPods are very aggressive with power savings.
Don't they also treat their hard disks badly? I know that the disks made
for use in mp3 players are NOT quite the same as those in laptops (1.8" or 1"
instead of 2.5") and perhaps these drives are built with frequent spin up/down
in mind.

Re:What about iPods?

[Cairnarvon]

iPod hard drives are easier to engineer in the sense that you know what kind of software is going to be running on iPods and how they're going to be used. You don't have that kind of knowledge when it comes to laptops, so you have to aim for a good balance.
Hitachi, though, apparently shot and missed by a mile.

Re:wow, I had Ubuntu kill a laptop hard drive . .

[jpeavey]

strange, Hitachi Harddrive sounds like an ubuntu approved device with it's alliteration and all.

Re:i hate to say this but:

[trolltalk.com]

"Need to do constant hard drive images (and the space needed to store them). I think this requires a reboot which is annoying."

For future reference, no rebooting is required.

- Assuming an external drive (/dev/sdc1) mounted on /media/external_drive -

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/media/external_drive/backup-2007-10-30.img

You can even pipe it through gzip or bzip2 to make it smaller, and if you want to make it REALLY small, first create a bunch of huge files, and fill them with zeros, then delete the files.

Or you can mount the image later via the loopback device, fill the dead space with zeros, and compress.

Re:Tags..

[Shados]

my thought exactly. Also, note that this is true wether the article is right or not, since many Vista articles that were completly 100% false got tagged that way.

Same thing on Slackware 11

[Maestro485]

I have Slackware 11 on my laptop and I just checked the Load_Cycle_Count with:

smartctl -d ata -a /dev/hda

Currently the count is up to 1195740! So either I have the most durable drive ever created or this thing is going to explode soon. Does anybody have any suggestions on this? I don't know much about acpi.

Re:Same thing on Slackware 11

[sayfawa]

I'd only be really concerned if you see it continue to up. Mind is quite high also (though a factor of 10 lower than yours) but over the past 10 minutes it hasn't gone up at all. If it really had started at 0 when I got the drive it would have to be going up every 2 minutes for it to be at the point that it's at now.

But, I admit that I really don't understand this whole thing.

Also, someone here also claims that the buggy behaviour only happens if ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE is set to 'true' in /etc/default/acpi-support

Re:Same thing on Slackware 11

[Maestro485]

It was going up a tic every few seconds or so. I think this has been mentioned elsewhere by now, but

hdparm -B 255 /dev/hda

takes care of it. It states on the hdparm man page that a value of 255 disables apm on the drive, thereby preventing any more Load_Cycle_Count's. Of course I'm not sure if disabling apm is the correct solution, but as I stated before I'm not terribly familiar with acpi/apm.

Does anyone know of any sane apm settings or is disabling apm the most appropriate solution?

Re:Same thing on Slackware 11

[sayfawa]

It was going up a tic every few seconds or so.

Wow, I would be concerned too. This page seems to suggest that your solution is still the consensus of people in the know. But a 254 in the command apparently makes apm less agressive in whatever it does instead of just disabling it like 255 does.

Re:Same thing on Slackware 11

[The Analog Kid]

Mine's 127863 and it's a good thing this article was posted, I wouldn't have known otherwise and my laptop is only a little more than a year old, and yet the HDD has used 1/6th of it's life.

Also, someone here also claims that the buggy behaviour only happens if ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE is set to 'true' in /etc/default/acpi-support

The bug reports suggestion is that you hand over HD power management to laptop-tools, so which is it, is it good or bad? I wish there was some definitive answers regarding what settings causes this issue because right now there are a lot of different reasons and suggestions being posted. Will leaving your HD constantly spinning break it too? I can't wait for solid state drives, as this issue won't be a problem (although I'm sure there will be others)

Re:i hate to say this but:

[LMacG]

Wasn't it HP that refused to fix somebody's laptop hinge because they were running Linux?

Ah, here it is -- sticky keys, not broken hinge, but still. You might want to give that cute gal in Canada a call back.

Re:wow, I had Ubuntu kill a laptop hard drive . .

[nurb432]

Mine hasnt died, but i did notce that it will loudly park out of the blue every so often while im using it. ( with kubuntu, so they didnt make any changes )

Time to try the fix, once the site comes back up from oblivion.

Re:i hate to say this but:

[Cal Paterson]

A replacement drive is much less than 200 bucks, and the warranty doesn't buy you you lost data back. Spend the 200 bucks on backing up instead.

Re:i hate to say this but:

[Vancorps]

Wow, you just like to do everything the hard way. Just use a roaming profile like the rest of us laptop users. Your laptops dies you just use another laptop while you get a replacement. In the meantime you have all your files and if SMS is employed you also have all your applications within minutes of switching. More time might be necessary if for instance SMS has to install Office or some other large app but still, it's not near as inconvenient as you make it out to be.

Also, with HP specifically and I'm sure others as well you get the replacement the next day in advance of the bad hard drive and you'll have a tech some with it to install it for you. Then IT lays down the base image and you login, SMS takes care of all your applications and you're back on your full time laptop with minutes of downtime or possibly even less depending on your requirements.

Re:Vista Jokes, Anyone?

[pandrijeczko]

A single parameter change to the "hdparm" command fixes the cause of this problem - sorry, but just how many of Windows numerous flaws are fixable by editing a single text file?

Re:Confused....

[Evil Adrian]

preferences -> homepage -> uncheck crappy authors

I have Zonk unchecked. Forget why.

Re:Confused....

[AmaDaden]

Yes http://hardware.slashdot.org/users.pl?op=edithome If your logged in that should take you to the preferences page that will let you hide the posts of who ever you want. If it doesn't work you can get to it from Preferences then Homepage.
Can someone tell me why people hate kdawson so much? His posts are a little FUDy but I would rather know bout these things then not.

Re:Tags..

[pandrijeczko]

With all respect, but just how many laptops & desktop PCs have *YOU* seen sold with 512MB (even 256MB) RAM for Windows XP or 1GB (even 512MB) for Windows Vista, all of which are far too little memory for each OS?

And guess what happens when a bloated MS operating system gets used with too little RAM! Yep, huge swapfile, endless disk thrashing. more drive wear and tear...

"Mr Black Kettle, meet Mr Black Pot."

Re:That's not what I'm worried about

[Goldberg's Pants]

On both 7.04 and 7.10 the Ubuntu stuff failed miserably to set up my GF8 card, and I had to rely on Envy (which worked like a champ first time).

This hard drive issue is a concern as I was literally a day or two from throwing Gutsy on mine. Think I'll wait and see how this all pans out.

Re:That's not what I'm worried about

[pipatron]

Ahh... too bad I support VHEMT, otherwise I would now commit to naming my firstborn son to Svorjborgytorg!

-- Anders Andersson

Re:That's not what I'm worried about

[Goldberg's Pants]

Or if you've got an nVidia card and the official restricted driver manager doesn't cut it for you, google "envy nvidia", download, and you'll be up and running in no time. It's not like nVidia haven't had their issues in the past. There's the refresh rate bug from days of yore, there's the aspect ratio correction now that doesn't work properly on most cards etc... So your claim that it just "works" has a few caveats my friend.

what a shame that it's been open for so long

[darkwhite]

Wow.

I've noticed this behavior on my laptop, in fact I wrote a little script to stop the hard drive from doing the unloadings. I actually use Gentoo, but I wrote an ebuild for the acpi-support package to take advantage of Ubuntu's nice power management features. I didn't think Ubuntu's scripts would be the ones putting the drive into that mode!

Another thing is that if you plug the laptop in while it's asleep, then wake it, the power.sh script does not even fire, so you still get the head load cycles all the time even after plugging in.

This is really bad for all the laptops out there. Ubuntu needs to stop this behavior in acpi-support and ship an update now.

Re:what a shame that it's been open for so long

[darkwhite]

Having looked at this more closely, it's clear that this is not ubuntu's fault, since those "-B 1" lines don't get called unless laptop mode is enabled. So the problem is that many hard drives default to harmful power management settings after certain conditions are met. Windows resets their power management to reasonable settings, while Linux does nothing. So it's not an Ubuntu problem after all... though setting hdparm -B 128 (the suggested value for my drive) in the acpi scripts after every wake-up wouldn't hurt.

Similar issue with new WD10EACS desktop drive

[mmontour]

I see a similar issue with my new WD10EACS (1 TB Western Digital "Green Power") desktop drive:

ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
    9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 582
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 180 180 000 Old_age Always - 62848

I don't know the drive's rating for Load_Cycle_Count, but the scaled SMART attribute has gone down from 181 yesterday to 180 today so it does seem to be burning through its allocated cycles quite rapidly.

Interestingly, this drive does not appear to support the "hdparm -B 255" command:

mythtv:~# hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda /dev/sda:
  setting Advanced Power Management level to disabled
  HDIO_DRIVE_CMD failed: Input/output error

"hdparm -I" lists "Power Management feature set" and "Automatic Acoustic Management feature set", but not "Advanced Power Management feature set".

The system is running Debian Etch with a 2.6.23 kernel, and I'm using hdparm version 7.7. I am not using any "laptop mode" settings (at least, none that I can see).

Re:Similar issue with new WD10EACS desktop drive

[DamnStupidElf]

mythtv:~# hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda /dev/sda:
setting Advanced Power Management level to disabled
HDIO_DRIVE_CMD failed: Input/output error

You need to be root or use sudo.

Re:Similar issue with new WD10EACS desktop drive

[mmontour]

You need to be root or use sudo. True, but irrelevant (the command was run as root, or else it would have given a "Permission denied" rather than an "Input/output error"). The command is being sent to the drive but the drive doesn't like it:

ata2.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
ata2.00: cmd ef/85:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/40 tag 0 cdb 0x0 data 0
                  res 51/04:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/40 Emask 0x1 (device error)

Re:ACPI is fine

[Anonymous Coward]

ACPI is a perfectly fine standard. The problem is the motherboard manufacturers who implement shoddy bios. Almost all bioses out there fail to comply with the standard and have other bugs like this one. They don't get fixed because they just make a windows driver to work around the problem, leaving linux to bump into the bugs left in the bios.

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

Re:It is NOT Ubuntu

[tweak13]

I don't know if this applies to all Seagate drives or not, but I do know that all the desktop seagate drives that I have don't display SMART data correctly. I'd be willing to bet that number is complete crap, along with most of the rest of the SMART data.

Re:It is NOT Ubuntu

[loserMcloser]

In the case of the Seagate Momentus 7200.1 (I have one as well), that 600,000 number comes right from the data sheet (PDF).

Re:It is NOT Ubuntu

[Epsillon]

Quite right. It's not Ubuntu. FreeBSD exhibited the same problem whilst on the AC adapter. I've disabled my countermeasures. Count was 33136 about ten minutes ago. It's now 33149. Yes, it really did take the 30,000+ tap-tap-tap sounds of the heads parking before I did something about it and this drive is a WD Scorpio less than a year old.

The solution on FreeBSD is sysutils/ataidle set up to change the profile of the drive at boot. There's bog-all in what passes for a CMOS setup utility on this box to make changes to APM. Of course, this also has the drawback of lowering battery life and also means that the heads will be spending more time hovering over my data with nothing but a few gas atoms between them and my couple of angstroms of magnetic material. Don't drop the lappy is my advice. Oh, hold on, I was supposed to be saying NOT to worry too much about Ubuntu eating hard drives, given that almost every OS I have here (not tried Solaris yet, give me a chance) does the same thing, not pointing out how bloody flimsy these things are and hinting at the ridiculousness of still being stuck with what basically amounts to a miniaturised Winchester disk despite all the other advances in IT...

I think someone has taken this idea that there's a problem with Ubuntu (OMG! Teh L1nuck5 SuX!!1!eleventy-one!) and run with it, though. This seems to be a problem with the default APM settings on certain hardware, not anything to do with the operating systems. In fact, both FreeBSD and [Ku|U]buntu seem to leave the settings alone until you enable a different profile with hdparm or ataidle. I can say this with confidence because I have both and neither alters the rate attribute 193 increments unless I specifically do something to change the APM level. Not only that but the drive on another portable still makes the little "tap-tap, lemme out" noises whilst running Windows (he's a kid, he plays games. What would you have me do, confiscate the thing?).

The only good thing that's come out of this silly "bash Ubuntu-fest" is that far more people now know to watch smartctl -a, Adenix SI or whatever floats one's boat to watch hard disk drives. I wager you (backed by surety of the contents of my keyboard - trust me, you don't want to win this bet) that this isn't isolated to Ubuntu or even *nix-alike operating systems, although I won't dare say that OS-X more than likely shares this issue. Take a real close listen to that shiny new Macbook, though. Hear that? That's not a secret message from the God of style praising you on your sense of aesthetics. It's probably just your hard drive heads parking. It really is just another computer, you know ;-)

Re:It is NOT Ubuntu

[cygonik]

..and for what reason would you expect all hardware manufacturers to all be identical in an area that requires no definitive standard?

I can see it now: "Thats enough development from now on in that area. Since our competitor's drives are rated at 600,000 parks, let's just stop here and be done with it."

Re:It is NOT Ubuntu

[toddestan]

I would expect a higher count on a lot of Thinkpads, due to the active HDD protection they use (forgot the name exactly). Basically how it works is if the computer senses a shock/drop, it quickly parks the heads so that they can't crash into into the platters, hence a lot of load/unload counts (however, several million seems rather extreme). Depending on how sensitive it's set, you can probably activate it by just picking up the computer and walking around with it powered on. In Windows, by default you'll have a little icon showing a play/pause icon showing the status of the active protection.

Re:It is NOT Ubuntu

[Bill Wong]

Maybe it's closer to "Well, our technology in that area has exceeded our competitors, but, we don't want divulge what the exact number is, so, we'll just say that it matches their spec." Wishful thinking on my part?

Re:It is NOT Ubuntu

[mgblst]

Before last night it was only about 50,677.

Re:It is NOT Ubuntu

[cygonik]

Hehehe. Probably. :-)

Hell yeah we are saving energy.

[Devv]

To those saying "Did you think energy-saving would come with out cost?":
Well if the cost is energy then it's pointless right? Think about:
1. Mining and refining materials used in drive.
2. Manufacturing drive.
3. Trucks shipping the drive from factory to customer.
After all that the drive comes home to you only to have a much shorter lifetime because you want to save energy. Now you just have to buy a new drive because that's the cost of saving energy, and transport the old one to proper recycling facilities.

Ubuntu is NOT causing aggressive power management

[ubuntu_demon]

Ubuntu is NOT causing aggressive power management.

The following things might instead cause aggressive power management settings :

* your (laptop) harddrive firmware might have aggressive power management defaults (operating system independent)
* your (laptop) BIOS might set your harddrive to use aggressive power management (operating system independent)
* you might have enabled laptop-mode in /etc/default/acpi-support (disabled by default) which will set your harddrive to use aggressive power management

These aggressive power management settings are set by your BIOS or harddrive firmware. Windows and/or Mac OS X might be overriding these settings which might make Ubuntu look bad if Ubuntu doesn't override these settings.

Read here what Matthew Garret an experienced and well known Ubuntu Developer has said about this problem :
http://www.advogato.org/person/mjg59/diary/82.html

for more information see :
http://ubuntudemon.wordpress.com/2007/10/30/ubuntu-is-not-causing-aggressive-power-management/

Re:Confused....

[Joebert]

Is that a button only for subscribers or somthing ?
I can't find the Uncheck Crappy Authors option.

Re:Vista Jokes, Anyone?

[compro01]

Technically, Ubuntu is doing the Right Thing with the settings (it queries the hard drive for the proper settings as defined by the manufactuer), but it seems that the manufactuers put in bad values (possibly due to "why bother? windows just ignores this stuff anyway."), resulting in frequent spin up/spin down behaviour.

while it appears to be the manufactuer's fault, it's faster/easier/cheaper for Ubuntu to fix it in software by overriding those settings with more sane ones.

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.

No OS then

[theeddie55]

but Ubuntu (and perhaps any OS) may be dramatically shortening the life of your laptop's hard drive
does this mean the only way around it is to not use an OS, hence not use the computer. admittedly the hard drive would last longer if you don't use it.

Re:This is not an Ubuntu problem. Read the referen

[Wapiti-eater]

Sorry - forgot the link!

http://mjg59.livejournal.com/77672.html

Re:Vista Jokes, Anyone?

[tjstork]

A single parameter change to the "hdparm" command fixes the cause of this problem - sorry, but just how many of Windows numerous flaws are fixable by editing a single text file?

Before we turn this into a Vista vs Ubuntu flamewar, understand that I will be upgrading my Opteron with Ubuntu over SUSE 10 long before Vista even sees it.

The point is that this is the sort of behavior Microsoft would actually test for, and have. Check out there blog "old new thing", and see some of the hoops they've gone through in the past with respect to hardware compatibility. A lot of it, as some posters allude to, is in fact the fault of hardware manufacturers writing sloppy drivers... but a good one was a software bug. Evidentally a popular but unnamed third party application would use a device context after they released it, so, they actually put something into the OS so that that application would work. The point is not to slam Ubuntu, really, it is that OSS testing in some cases doesn't match what you can do when you have some money to put on the table... those fancy test labs do come in handy sometimes.

The downside is, really, the application had a bug and should be fixed, and, ironically, were the windows world open source, microsoft could have just spent a few bucks, fixed the application, and not have had to put in their closed source hack to fix someone else's broken closed source product.

Re:i hate to say this but:

[Kankraka]

Funny that you mention a hinge breaking not being covered by warranty. My room mate leaves his machine on a desk, and in a bag when moving it anywhere. One day he opened it, the hinge jammed, and the plastic outer casing is now broken around the left hinge. HP refuses to fix it claiming it's abuse that caused it.

Ubuntu FOUND the problem

[darkonc]

One of the comments notes that at least one drive had the same problem with Windows -- The difference is that, lacking ubiquitous SMART tools, Windows users would be much less likely to get to the source of the problem.

So, it comes down to: Ubuntu users were able to diagnose the problem, and have the tools to implement a workaround. Nix to either for Windows users -- they just need to remember to replace their drive once a year.

Re:Ubuntu FOUND the problem

[mapsjanhere]

Odd, Windows had the ability to set the hard drive sleep time since 3.1 at least, under the screen saver settings. But that doesn't require command line usage, so it's definitely SIMPLE, not SMART

Re:Ubuntu FOUND the problem

[ivan256]

Hard drive sleep time != ACPI aggressiveness setting.

You can set that as high as you want, and the drive will still use its internal setting to sleep more frequently if it is configured to. All the windows setting does is set how long Windows will wait before sending an explicit command to the drive to tell it to sleep.

Nice guess though.

Re:Ubuntu FOUND the problem

[maxume]

A windows user who knows what SMART is could go right ahead and download any one of the dozen free tools available. An Ubuntu user who doesn't know what it is isn't going to be helped out a whole lot by it being there.

HD Tune and Speedfan are among the better utils:

http://www.hdtune.com/
http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php

Re:Tags..

[pandrijeczko]

With all respect, you are (like me) an experienced computer user who can probably trim down XP to run smoothly on low-spec hardware, I am not denying that.

But, on that basis, if you mean to tell me you have never been approached by a friend or relative to fix a Windows XP machine that is taking several minutes to boot up, not least because it has too little RAM for what it is expecting to run, then you have no idea what you are talking about. Look on any web site or in any PC store and you will find budget PCs with bare minimum spec that run Windows just about okay for a week or two but rapidly grind to a halt the moment you start installing new stuff.

Yep, an experienced Windows user like you or me can keep XP running pretty slickly - but then an experienced Linux user like me can also write a simple script to stop the disk thrashing problem.

Re:Vista Jokes, Anyone?

[pandrijeczko]

With all respect, I think the main cause of this type of problem is that Linux developers have to backwards engineer drivers on the basis that the hardware people don't issue the specifications or write Linux drivers themselves.

Microsoft has close partnerships with hardware developers so we would be very susprised if this woul happen to them.

Odd

[Kankraka]

I run Ubuntu 7.10 on my HP, and have a fresh install of XP pro sp2. The HDD access light is blinking constanly under windows, while sitting idle at the desktop. I can hear the HDD being accessed all the time too, plugged in or not. Under Ubuntu the HDD access light never lights up while sitting idle until the screensaver kicks in, then it's for a quick flicker. Plugged in or not. Ubuntu gives me better battery life, almost double of what windows does (approx 45m to an hour with windows, almost two hours with ubuntu) with power settings all set to leave everything running, backlight full on, ect. So I personally think, Windows is gonna pack this drive in before Ubuntu does.

noatime & nodiratime

[redelm]

Yes, boyz'n'grlls spin-up kills hard-disks. And worse with Unix and other Linux-like OSes since they modify the directory entries each time a file is accessed (even from cache), updating the 'atime' entry. AFAIK, MS-ntfs has no such entry. Yet :)

This is a well-known performance-killer (imagine a newspool), so disks should be mount'd with the `noatime` and `nodiratime` options if at all possible. This can be done automagically by replacing 'defaults' with 'noatime,nodiratime' in /etc/fstab .

Re:noatime & nodiratime

[Fweeky]

NTFS has atime too.

Re:That's not what I'm worried about

[mhall119]

Ubuntu 7.10 included X.org 7.4, which has much better support for dual monitors and projectors. 7.10 also includes a new "Screens and Graphics" application for configuring X.org, including setting your graphics card driver and monitor information. This makes editing xorg.conf mostly unnecessary, the only time I have had to edit mine recently was because some update removed the "AddARGBVisuals" options required by my nVidia card to run Compiz. After entering in the make and model of my monitor, I was given all the resolution and refresh rate options supported, I had to manually enter them in 7.04. You should definitely try 7.10 if you are interested in using Ubuntu

Note: I don't think the LiveCD loads the nVidia driver's kernel module, so you may not be able to play with all of this in a liveCD session.

fudmuffin

[EmbeddedJanitor]

proposed new autotag for all kdawson stuff.

Only Laptop HDs?

[cc_pirate]

What about Hitachi desktop HDs? I hope they don't do this idiocy.

Anyone know?

Re:Only Laptop HDs?

[cygonik]

It's audible. You can also check using the script and/or instructions that is linked to from various posts here.

Could be worse

[carrett]

This bug is still the worst I've seen: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=155873

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.

Re:That's not what I'm worried about

[mortonda]

Compared to my latest experience with windows drivers, Linux is far cry better... I tried to install and older but still useful ATI card in my wife's computer, and it works well for some games, but turns out it can't do 800x600 resolution in some bit depth, which is what the Age of Empires set needs to boot up. There's no driver that will work for it, and it is now unsupported. If only I could edit a config file to add that mode! At least with X I have an option.

beware of smart values

[ChrisJones]

Something worth bearing in mind here is that the raw output of smartctl is not necessarily helpful. By way of an example, this is what I get on my Thinkpad X40:

193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 071 071 000 Old_age Always - 2956632174724

A rough calculation suggests that, being 14 months old, that claims to be parking/unparking the disk over 80,000 times a second, which is very clearly physically impossible. The value is clearly not always a simple counter.

Re:Ubuntu? Slashdot!

[geminidomino]

Doesn't compare to what Video did... the scene at the Radio Star's apartment was BRUTAL.

I have yet to a dead drive...

[Skiron]

I purchased a Dell Inspiron 6400 (UK) model in Sept. and was alerted to this reading through the forums. Following the advice sorted it OK. No big deal, but what it also means is that disk heads are not 'parked' so often, so a laptop on the 'move' could do more damage to a drive than what the setting does anyway (i.e. the drive goes to sleep a lot, thus giving semi-protection against a *bump* or two).

I was also surprised that laptop drives are not mounted 'noatime/nodiratime' either, as that saves a bit of wear.

But, anyway, I think this report is a bit over the top - have there been ANY reports of hard drives failing because of the Load_Cycle_Count exceeding specification?

Something causing problems?

[Mr. Freeman]

The way I read that story was "Something in your computer may be causing problems for your hard drive". Maybe it's just me, but I don't think this constitutes news.

Re:That's not what I'm worried about

[mhall119]

Say what you will about Windows or Apple, but I buy a video card for my monitor, and it just works. I've heard horror stories about ATI drivers in Vista (XP too for that matter), and I don't think you can buy just any old video card and install it into your Mac, can you?

Re:i hate to say this but:

[blhack]

Which is exactly why I plan on DBANing the disk before I send it in. :)

"I don't know why there isn't anything on the disk....maybe it got a virus!"

Hard Drive clicking

[ShawnX]

It's simple, Flash the hard disk firmware and disable power management. I did this for my ThinkPad T42 disk and no more clicking.

It's the power management, the clicking is for the heads to idle while not in use.

Wonder

[Nick_taken]

I wonder how many people didnt RTFA and what is more sad, it seems mods didnt either. Ubuntu is using the manufacturer values, the recommended ones, it should provide a workaround? yes. Does windows provide a workaround? no, windows dont even care about manufacturer values.

Re:Blame Microsoft.

[Wolvie MkM]

It's Bush's fault.

What about macs / OS X?

[aliquis]

In my power saving settings on the macbook pro it says that it will turn of the harddrive as much as possible, and that is the only option, do it or don't do it.

I've been thinking about how bad it may be earlier and now I wonder even more. Does anyone know how agressive OS X is? Shall I let it be on or off?

Re:What about macs / OS X?

[sexybomber]

it will turn of the harddrive as much as possible, and that is the only option, do it or don't do it.

There's gotta be a way to fine-tune it. I'd guess that there is a similar process to the Linux ones discussed above that works for Mac-flavored BSD, although I have no idea what it might be.

Re:What about macs / OS X?

[aliquis]

Yeah, may be thru "defaults" command but why not show the options? It's so annoying everything isn't there in OS X, and that it ships without manuals to read thru =P

Re:What about macs / OS X?

[cygonik]

First: Mac OS X is probably absolutely fine.

It's an audible click that is louder than the normal whirrs and clicks your hard drive makes.
To get an example, put your mac into sleep mode. You should hear a click from the hard drive as the head is parked.
If you hear that all the time (once a minute or so), then yes, it's too aggressive. But unless it's happening once a minute or more, it shouldn't be an issue. It's also fine if after you let it sit, it makes the click noise, but doesn't repeat that often.

Even if your system were parking twice every five minutes, and did so on *EVERY* five minutes (I.e., your system is never off, and you're never using it in a way that prevents it), you'd still have at least two years solid without problems.

On my Ubuntu system, it would park more than once per minute -- which gave me less than a year on my HD.

Re:What about macs / OS X?

[aliquis]

I don't hear my harddrive, I've heard it some time I think but I would never know if it turned of.

Ok, thanks for your information, and yes, it would indeed be weird if Apple used defaults which was very bad for the hardware, even if it could save some battery time.

(BTW it also sleeps on cable I belive, maybe I should turn that of?)

But Ubuntu can fix it

[Nursie]

Or rather, you can fix it with a little workaround.

I'd just like to say - THANKYOU SLASHDOT! for bringing this to my attention.

My laptop is only a couple of weeks old and the counter had already crept up to 7300. I have no idea if that's high or not, but after reading this in the office today I came home and switched the laptop on without putting the stereo on for a change. Not only was the counter going up, but I could hear the disk whine and click as it was spinning up and down. After applying hdparm -B 254, all is well again.

I would have been most pissed off if the drive had gone, especially seeing as the only warranty I have is on the other side of the atlantic!

hmmm

[smash]

for a while i was running a patch on vista (i forget which one, don't have the box here) that supposedly "improved performance" and resulted in extremely excessive hard disk clicking/power saving.

Within 2-3 weeks i had a drive failure - drive still has near on 3 years of warranty left...

Now, not to blame vista in particular, but i don't think this problem is likely limited to ubuntu...

Re:Blame Microsoft.

[Macthorpe]

Why would you post a link to something that is debunked in the very first reply?

That's right - because nobody who loves Linux could ever think you're wrong!

Thanks subby

[iCEBaLM]

Thanks subby for this article. I've got a Hitachi HTS721060G9AT00 in a Mac Mini running Gentoo, and has been for about a year (they make nice little servers), and sure enough this is what I found:

193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0012 013 013 000 Old_age Always - 873510

873510??!?!?! I run the command a couple times in the span of a few seconds and it seems to be incrementing every second. The drive is only rated for 600000 load/unload cycles!

hdparm -D 255 did the trick.

Re:That's not what I'm worried about

[Doug Neal]

Sorry for continuing to drift off topic a bit, but I had to mention this as I spent a couple of hours fighting with that display configuration tool only this morning. It feels like it was thrown together in a hurry. Dual head support is completely broken - a simple case of two monitors each attached to the DVI and the VGA ports on a Radeon 9600, it couldn't handle at all, the X server segfaulted on startup. I eventually discovered that this was due to the new RandR 1.2 system in the latest Xorg taking over multiple display related operations from Xinerama, and if Xinerama is enabled it crashes...

All handled perfectly in Feisty by the way. If you haven't upgraded yet and you're running multiple monitors, be prepared for problems :P

Re:My experience

[ChrisJones]

You are assuming that the raw numbers (142886 and 143016) are actual counts of head unparks. they may not be. It is very common for laptop drives to spit out uncalibrated numbers (e.g. my laptop claims to unpark the heads 80,000 times a second, which physically isn't possible and would wear out the disk (if the highly dubious 600,000 figure is correct) in under a minute)

far more useful in SMART are the VALUE WORST THRESH and TYPE columns. Since Load_Cycle_Count is an Old_age value, and the THRESH is 0, it means that it starts at 100 and goes down as the drive ages. When it reaches 0 it means the drive manufacturer believes that is roughly equivalent to the useful duty life of the drive.

Currently yours is on 86, so it's actually only down 14%, which gives you nearly 3 more years of likely life from it. That is about typical of modern laptops afaics.

A far more useful test here would be to run the same test on Ubuntu and Windows on the same hardware (there is a smartctl port at http://hdparm-win32.dyndns.org/hdparm/ )
Given that Ubuntu does not change the disk power management settings in your BIOS and/or hard disk firmware, the only variable here is whether or not Windows overrides those settings with more or less conservative values than the existing defaults (and of course it's possible that your OEM pre-installs with other settings than Windows would natively choose on a vanilla install).

For all of the screaming and wailing about Ubuntu killing disks I have not seen a single post anywhere where anyone has posted any kind of hard data that Ubuntu is behaving in any way differently to other operating systems. Ergo this is still very very much unproven - unless anyone can link to something that says otherwise?

Cheers,

What else kills Laptop HD's: HEAT

[IdeaMan]

Don't believe that google survey about heat, its for desktops. I went through 3 hard disks on my dell laptop before I started using a laptop cooler (usb tray with fan(s) cooling the bottom of the laptop). Quit eating HD's after that.

Re:What else kills Laptop HD's: HEAT

[Typoboy]

Can we get a linux port of the HCF instruction?

Me too. I wondered if it was Ubuntu's fault...

[PRMan]

Very interesting.

My fix

[Ankur Dave]

I have this problem on a Dell Precision M90 laptop with a Seagate 120GB 5400rpm drive. Others are calling the article FUD, and while it may or may not be Ubuntu's fault (since some other Linux distros seem to do this too), what really matters is the fix. I already had laptop-mode enabled, so rather than apply the rather kludgy fix of setting hdparm -B255 /dev/sda to run at startup and resume, I simply edited my /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf. I replaced the section "Hard drive behaviour settings" with these settings:

LM_BATT_MAX_LOST_WORK_SECONDS=600
LM_AC_MAX_LOST_WORK_SECONDS=600
CONTROL_READAHEAD=1
LM_READAHEAD=3072
NOLM_READAHEAD=128
CONTROL_NOATIME=1
CONTROL_HD_IDLE_TIMEOUT=1
LM_AC_HD_IDLE_TIMEOUT_SECONDS=7200
LM_BATT_HD_IDLE_TIMEOUT_SECONDS=7200
NOLM_HD_IDLE_TIMEOUT_SECONDS=7200
CONTROL_HD_POWERMGMT=1
BATT_HD_POWERMGMT=254
LM_AC_HD_POWERMGMT=255
NOLM_AC_HD_POWERMGMT=255
CONTROL_HD_WRITECACHE=1
NOLM_AC_HD_WRITECACHE=1
NOLM_BATT_HD_WRITECACHE=1
LM_HD_WRITECACHE=1

These settings fix both the problem of the hard drive spinning down after only a few seconds of inactivity, and the problem of the hard drive parking too often. To the people who are trying to turn this article into an attack on Windows by saying that Windows has this problem too, but only Linux users are savvy enough to notice it, that's not true. On my laptop, Vista seems not to park the drive automatically at all.

Re:My experience

[Anonymous Coward]

I did that test. Ubuntu 3 or 4 load/unload cycles per minute. Tried every hdparm setting I could think of without any visible effect.

Windows (2000 professional), normally around one load/unload cycle every 3 minutes or so. Sometimes it seems to go to sleep completly and does not load/unload for a long time until I resume use.

The Windows behavior is more or less reasonable and will extend my HDD life at least for a few more years. Ubuntu's behavior is a killer and I cannot tolerate it.

I have the feeling, but cannot confirm, that the problem with ubuntu is not excesive parking per se but that it unparks the head almost imediatly after parking like if something in the OS was accesing the HDD inmediatly after parking (my HDD was mounted -noatime so atime was not the culprit)

Re:My experience

[ChrisJones]

Please post the outputs of your testing to the bug on launchpad so the relevant developers can assess the results.

Re:Slashdot comment browsing is unusable

[sexconker]

I signed up for an account just to get rid of that, and guess what, I still have it!

I've poured over every setting in the options page.

Halp?

Re:That's not what I'm worried about

[Anonymous Coward]

Cheerleading, regeneration, and Linux use! You're certainly a woman of many talents.

Re:May be FUD, but it happened to me

[jcuervo]

The repartitioning software (I forget what it is) gparted.

Re:Confused....

[treeves]

You have to make decision as to which ones are crappy and deselect them individually. I deselected kdawson, FWIW.
OK, I know it was a joke, but someone may be looking for it even now...

In other news....

[Techman83]

Vista is killing hard drives... I don't mean to sound like a troll here, but watching the HDD activity of a Vista notebook (It had 2GB of ram, so should be plenty!), compared to WinXP and Ubuntu, I can tell you which OS pulses the HDD more. I would argue that it is just as bad as Frequent load cycles (which are set by drive manufacturers not the OS, just like most things, MS just ignore and do there own thing anyway) and solely at the Whim of the OS Manufacturer

Say what you will, but my general advice to people is to increase their RAM so that there HDD life is extended, but with Vista it doesn't matter how much ram you've got, hard drive activity is constant.

Hmm...

[ewhac]

I'm not running Ubuntu, but I am running Debian unstable. So I checked with hdparm -a. Slashdot's lame(ness) filter prevents me from posting the complete output, but here are some highlights:

ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 106 090 034 Pre-fail Always - 227087688
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000f 070 060 030 Pre-fail Always - 12439012
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 097 097 000 Old_age Always - 3278
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 032 Old_age Always - 380
190 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 059 046 045 Old_age Always - 689635369
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 001 001 000 Old_age Always - 459707
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 041 054 000 Old_age Always - 41 (Lifetime Min/Max 0/16)
195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered 0x001a 063 048 000 Old_age Always - 227087688

This laptop is six months old. I'm inclined to worry...

Schwab

Not Just Ubuntu

[markbthomas]

This isn't just Ubuntu, I just fired up my 5-year-old laptop with Debian from 2 years ago installed on it (haven't used it in 2 years) and smartctl gives me 184,305 load cycles in 2179 power on hours. The hard drive clicks every 30 seconds or so when idle (I noticed it before but assumed it was something messing around with the disk). hdparm -B 254 /dev/hda stops it from going up any more.

Re:fuck you fanboy.

[Macthorpe]

Such an angry person, aren't you Twitter?

Re:Confused....

[aichpvee]

Probably because you went into shock as your blood-dupe level dropped and you needed another hit.

Re:Try PCLinuxOS

[AusIV]

This is a troll. If you'd read the article (or even the entire summary), you'd know that this is caused by one of three things.

1) A bios setting
2) A hard drive firmware setting
3) An ACPI setting that is turned off by default.

So unless PCLinuxOS overrides bios and firmware settings, and prohibits users from turning on the ACPI aggressive power save option, it in no way solves this problem.

I understand pimping your OS/distro of choice when other people are having a problem that can be solved by using your OS, but at least make sure your distro doesn't have the exact same problems before making a jackass of yourself.

Yeah, all of about $40 bucks of it...

[Capt. Skinny]

If you got Vista with the laptop, MS only got about $40 out of the deal. Hardly enough to buy a hard drive, let alone four.

hdparm -B 255

[MrKaos]

There are other values besides just turning the drive power management off. Ok, if it's set too agressively and cycling the heads, maybe it would be a good idea to establish what your drive is capable of. From the hdparm man page

-B Set Advanced Power Management feature, if the drive supports it. A low value means aggressive power manage- ment and a high value means better performance. A value of 255 will disable apm on the drive.

but there is more, power mode status

-C Check the current IDE power mode status, which will always be one of unknown (drive does not support this command), active/idle (normal operation), standby (low power mode, drive has spun down), or sleeping (low- est power mode, drive is completely shut down). The -S, -y, -Y, and -Z flags can be used to manipulate the IDE power modes.

and of course spindown timer

-S Set the standby (spindown) timeout for the drive. This value is used by the drive to determine how long to wait (with no disk activity) before turning off the spindle motor to save power. Under such circumstances, the drive may take as long as 30 seconds to respond to a subsequent disk access, though most drives are much quicker. The encoding of the timeout value is somewhat peculiar. A value of zero means "timeouts are disabled": the device will not automatically enter standby mode. Values from 1 to 240 specify multiples of 5 seconds, yielding timeouts from 5 seconds to 20 minutes. Values from 241 to 251 specify from 1 to 11 units of 30 minutes, yielding timeouts from 30 minutes to 5.5 hours. A value of 252 signifies a timeout of 21 minutes. A value of 253 sets a vendor-defined timeout period between 8 and 12 hours, and the value 254 is reserved. 255 is interpreted as 21 minutes plus 15 seconds. Note that some older drives may have very different interpretations of these values.

So there is a middle ground, if your drive supports it, hdparm -I will also yeild some interesting information about what features the drive will support. Just turning the power management off seems like a bit of a knee jerk reaction, especially when adjusting the amount of power management applied to the drive should deliver both i.e hdparm -B 196 YMMV.

I would have thought that spindown timer would be more relevant to apply, one other thing I've never found hard drives tuned to thier maximum throughput in a linux installation (I mainly use Fedora) so an investigation of the udma modes your drive will support may be a worthwhile investment in time see hdparm -X _some_number_here_ (RTFM - first) considering just about everything goes better when you do tune it right.

Re:Vista Jokes, Anyone?

[smash]

The point is that this is the sort of behavior Microsoft would actually test for, and have

You'd think... but you'd be wrong. There was a particular patch (can look up the patch number in a few days when i get home) that causes excessive hd activity (sounded like parking, to me - whilst running games, etc), and in my case, i reckon killed my 320gb SATA drive within a month or two of 50% power-on time.

Re:Slashdot comment browsing is unusable

[The Iso]

It's the first setting under Comments. Change Slashdot Interactive Discussion System to Slashdot Classic Discussion System.

Ubunto Error? Operator Error

[killmofasta]

Even on laptops, I turn of ALL APCI junk, ( They are turned off in the bios of the Sony Vio, I am typing this on. )

The APCI needs to be completely rethough from the concept on. I have never seen a good implementation of it, and its the thing most often fixed in BIOS updates. Starting from that level, no operating system can overcome the crippleware that APCI is, except by bypassing BIOS. Mac OS 8.6 thru 9.2.2 handled the interface amd program control the best, but the OS was so power-saving unfriendly that it made little diffrence in the long run. ( i.e. shortly after a spindown or unload cycle, it would powerup...after about 4 or 5 of these, it would stop powering the drive up, and you could run fast and long without HD spinnign up, the screen semi-dim, and the CPU flying away. )

Its sad that so few users experence the actualy design and implementation of good power saving.
Mabye when the cost of electric power is 10x what it is today, the issue will be revisited as something vagely inportant...

Fortunately

[RealBorg]

I had already removed the acpi-support package some time ago. I hate it when my computer develops a life of it's own and does things without being asked. Therefore I tried to removed all dispensable packages. I even considered replacing Ubuntu's init system with a plain startup script and gnome-session with a .xinitrc. And yes, I have done that a long time ago with RedHat.

Tom

Ubuntu doesn't kill drives by default

[Cato]

See http://ubuntudemon.wordpress.com/2007/10/26/laptop-hardrive-killer-bug/ for useful comments on this.

The high load/unload cycle counts can come from the operating system, BIOS, or hard drive firmware. By default, Ubuntu does not enable 'laptop mode', so it does not do anything to affect load/unload cycle counts.

Although it's not clear that this will kill drives quickly (could be several years, and in my experience hard drives only last that long anyway - a Windows laptop hard disk died on me after 2.5 years on Friday), I do think this is a bug in Ubuntu laptop mode that needs fixing (and probably similar bugs exist in other Linux distros, and perhaps Windows and MacOS X too).

Reduce Disk Accesses

[keean]

The problem is not the spin down time, but the fact that the drive is being spun up too frequently. You should use the features of laptop-mode to change the page-cache write back time... use lm_profiler to find which processes are causing the spin-ups, and disable, or reconfigure them to cause less frequent writes. This will catch all reads and writes to the disk from processes, but not from the kernel (swap)... so disable swap, and your laptop should go for hours without a disk access when idle...

Of course nothing can stop disk accesses if you are actually loading or saving data...

Another thing to consider is setting your laptop to suspend to RAM when idle, I know some people have problems with this, but it works perfectly for me.

Re:Reduce Disk Accesses

[AdmV0rl0n]

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The problem is thus:-

Its not that Linux is bad. Or open source is bad. On the contrary, they are all good.
However, There is a reason Ubuntu is being picked out here. And it gets to the centre of a hornets nest when we get really into this. Ubuntu is shipped, sold, maintained and produced with a primary aim. Its a computer OS for ordinary people.
(IHMO, Its a difficult aim for Linux to fulfill.)

Now, once you do this, You have to take on serious responsibility for doing so. This means that we can't wave our arms round slashdot proclaiming 5 minute fixes care of multiple text files that only the well embedded and knowledgable technical people find easy.

Its not a blame game. A problem has been found. So now, the people over at Ubuntu and elsewhere have to sit down, and think about it. If you are going to really offer an OS anyone can use, you have to accept that on occasions, not 'anyone' can fix it, and you have to do so.

If this were Apple, or MS, their commercial pressure would mean that their customers and partners would be seriously impacted. Thus, they would have a firefight going on right NOW and no doubt be coming up with a fix.

What I am seeing is disappointing. A lot of finger pointing, and a lot of blame being heaped on any other angle than the OS. Some of the dubious normal behaviour 'Its the hardware's fault', 'the user should go fix it themselves', 'We offer no warranty or guaratees'.

How this problem should be handled is that people inside the whole Linux community should look at this is simple. Putting our OS on there is causing an issue. It may not be the OS's fault, but its there. This would not be the first or last time. It needs a serious fix. And if we were today held accountable, which *luckily* we are not, for the days, weeks, months, or years of lost drive hours, *and* the knock on data losses, we would be utterly buried. So although we can't be held accountable, because we hide behind a clever license that ensures we can't be, we should behave as if we were, because that is nothing less than business, our users, consumers, our partners, and our friends should expect.

Now we are globally aware of the issue, this needs upping to an absolute top priority and a superb response from all vendors, and devs. Step up. No more bull.

Other distro's may get 'instructions', but in the case of Ubuntu, it needs to issue a point and click fix package or update/forced update. Its not a user 'fix' in that distro and others like it.

Ubuntu is NOT causing aggressive power management

[ubuntu_demon]

I'm a big fan of Ubuntu. I don't want to see Ubuntu hurt because it's not Ubuntu who is setting these aggressive power management defaults.

Some background of the problem :

If your harddrive spins down and spins up again your Load_Cycle_Count increases by one. If your harddrive head parks and unparks again your Load_Cycle_Count increases by one.

You don't want your Load_Cycle_Count to increase too fast.

Harddrive manufacturers seem to claim most harddrives can handle at least 600.000 Load_Cycles but this is probably an average under ideal circumstances. My harddrive started to die slowly when at a Load_Cycle_Count of 200.000.

Ubuntu is NOT causing aggressive power management.

The following things might instead cause aggressive power management settings :

* your (laptop) harddrive firmware might have aggressive power management defaults (operating system independent)
* your (laptop) BIOS might set your harddrive to use aggressive power management (operating system independent)
* you might have enabled laptop-mode in /etc/default/acpi-support (disabled by default) which will set your harddrive to use aggressive power management

These aggressive power management settings are set by your BIOS or harddrive firmware. Windows and/or Mac OS X might be overriding these settings which might make Ubuntu look bad if Ubuntu doesn't override these settings.

Read here what Matthew Garret an experienced and well known Ubuntu Developer has said about this problem :
http://www.advogato.org/person/mjg59/diary/82.html

for more information see :
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/acpi-support/+bug/59695
http://ubuntudemon.wordpress.com/2007/10/30/ubuntu-is-not-causing-aggressive-power-management

Re:May be FUD, but it happened to me

[petermgreen]

there may be something odd going on in the partition table or boot area of the drive or similar.

try writing over the entire drive with zeros using dd.

CONFIRMED: Happens with Vista too

[flar2]

I installed the windows port of smartctl and can confirm that the load cycle count increases by more than one per minute on my Acer laptop running Windows Vista. Same behaviour as in Ubuntu (I dual boot). So this is definitely set by the BIOS, not the OS. That said, is this aggressive park setting actually a good feature, since laptops are mobile and you don't want the hardrive head bouncing around on the disk if you move the laptop, accidentally or otherwise?

When exactly is this a problem

[pentalive]

I did RTFM and I still have questions...

Does this happen in desktop machines or only laptops?

Does this happen only when using a power saving setting or with any power setting?

Does this happen with other distributions? (Fedora 7?)

The floppy on my C64...

[drolli]

There are programs which make funny noises and play music on commodores floppy drive by bashing the read head into the end position. SO this bug just awakens some nostalgic feelings....

Re:i hate to say this but:

[Cato]

Or you can use GNU ddrescue, which is similar to 'dd' in concept but efficiently handles disks with large numbers of bad blocks through binary search of the good and bad areas: http://directory.fsf.org/project/ddrescue/ Once you've backed up any critical files, just run ddrescue to recover and backup as much as you can onto a good hard disk.

This tool is invaluable when you have a dying hard disk - easy to use and very fast, compared to the similarly named dd_rescue (note underscore) and dd_rhelp. It's available as a package in Ubuntu, Fedora and other distros (sometimes package is called gddrescue), and it's part of the excellent SystemRescueCD, a compact recovery and rescue CD that includes many useful tools and includes support of virtually every Linux, Windows and Mac filesystem.

It's actually the filesystem (thus not Ubuntu!)

[unluckypixie]

I had this problem on my laptop but I refused to believe that the only solution to it was to turn off the power saving (which is what the "hdparm -B255" does). That's a crappy fix that deals with the symptom not the cause and I wish more people would just ask "what does it do?" before blindly following recommendations like this on forums!

A little research revealed that the ext3 filesystem updates it's journal every 5 seconds, coincidentally about as frequently as my hard drive was restarting. Adding a "commit=300" parameter to the mount line in fstab now means my hard drive only restarts once every five minutes to sync the file system and I still get the benefits of lower power usage in between.

On a desktop where the power could go off you would not want this, but if you have a laptop that is running on batteries, there is not going to be any loss of power so the only reason this longer sync period would be a problem would be if the system actually crashed, and everyone knows linux doesn't crash ;o)

So it's really an ext3 (therefore Linux kernel) thing rather than an Ubuntu problem, however it would be nice if Ubuntu automatically changed this sync setting when switching between battery and ac power.

Users who are not experiencing this problem are probably using a non-journalled filesystem like ext2.

APM levels grouped in blocks (at least Hitachi)

[netlsupe]

I looked up the spec for my HD - a Hitachi Travelstar 80GN - and experimented. I'm using Fedora BTW.

First, the APM levels (set with 'hdparm -B') are grouped in logical blocks: setting it to 128 or more (i.e., 80h) prevents the disk ever going to standby mode (at least automatically); similarly, setting it to 192 (C0h) or higher prevents the mode ever dropping to low power idle - no matter how long the period of inactivity. The heads are unloaded in low power idle and lower modes.

So, for my drive at least, the assertion that, with a value of 254, the drive "will still unload heads, but far less often" is not true. I would be suspicious of any other blanket statements about this setting.

From experiments, it seems the raw value of load cycle for my disk does indeed count transitions between low power idle and active idle, i.e., head load/unload cycles. However, the disk is still spinning in low power idle and power consumption is 0.65W, not very much less than the 0.85W of active idle, whereas recovery time deteriorates from 20ms to 300ms.

Based on that, 'hdparm -B192' seems a reasonable setting - higher might improve performance (at the cost of power) but it can't possibly reduce the load cycles any further.

Load_Cycle_Count on my drive is almost at its threshold, no other stat is anywhere near "old age" or "pre-fail". As a raw number, it's over a million.

Further, it definitely looks like a hard drive problem, not a Linux or even a BIOS one: my Hitachi's APM level is a reasonable 128 at power up but anything lower than 192 causes it to do quite frequent load/unloads - that is, if it's allowed to drop to low power idle at all then it will do so frequently and repeatedly without a prudent delay, sometimes several times a minute.

The drive mode transition times are supposed to adapt to the access pattern ("adaptive power save control"); I suspect the algorithm is flawed perhaps because they haven't tested against a sufficient number of usage profiles. Nothing in the manual gives me any reason to believe the drive's sub-192 behaviour is remotely healthy.

I'm going with 'hdparm -B192 -S60 /dev/hda'