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

[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.

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[TheCarp]

Does that mean we caught it spinning dirty?

-Steve

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!

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!

[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!

[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.

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

You're a Windows sysadmin ...

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

Gasp!

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...

Ubuntu?

[keithjr]

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

Isn't this what is supposed to happen?

[zappepcs]

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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?

[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.

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.

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

[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"

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

Read some of the Ubuntu forums

[bluefrogcs]

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

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: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:Blame Microsoft.

[EveryNickIsTaken]

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

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: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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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: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:Confused....

[Evil Adrian]

preferences -> homepage -> uncheck crappy authors

I have Zonk unchecked. Forget why.

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).

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:Confused....

[Joebert]

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

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.

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

[Wapiti-eater]

Sorry - forgot the link!

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

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

[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

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 .

fudmuffin

[EmbeddedJanitor]

proposed new autotag for all kdawson stuff.

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:Ubuntu? Slashdot!

[geminidomino]

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

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,

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.

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.

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.