Ubuntu eats your laptop's hard-drive
By Nick Farrell
October 31, 2007 - 8:00 AM

RUNNING your laptop on the user friendly Ubuntu Linux could shorten the life span of your hard-drive. According to the bugs forum at Launchpad, , when you switch to battery power on an Ubuntu laptop the hard drive goes though a load cycle a minute.

A standard laptop can handle about a 600,000 cycles in its lifetime which means that you will need a new hard drive every 1.1 years. The problem appears to be the default values set by the hard drive makers. Voleware ignores the default values and just runs its own, however it seems that Ubuntu made the grave mistake of doing what the hard drive manufacturers told them.

There are workarounds for the problem which involve disabling the defaults. According to one bod on Slashdot it can be done by doing the following:
Make a file named "99-hdd-spin-fix.sh".
In the file write the following lines:
#!/bin/sh and hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda. Save the file to three locations, /etc/acpi/suspend.d/, /etc/acpi/resume.d/ and
/etc/acpi/start.d/.

Then you should be ok, he thinks.

The Inquirer