Is Ubuntu killing hard drives?
Posted by Peng on 30 October 2007
It’s been suggested that laptop hard drives are failing sooner due to either the way Ubuntu accesses them, poor settings in the BIOS, or some other reason.
Slashdotter wwrmn writes in Ubuntu May Be Killing Your Laptop’s Hard Drive that “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.” But Roald Hopman, the Ubuntu Demon, writes that the problem could be caused by three possible things.
- 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
Whatever the reason, Roald asks that you make sure a bug report is filed and gives you some specific things that you should include in your bug report so they can find out exactly what’s happening and get it fixed for everyone.
Is Ubuntu killing hard drives? said
[...] Edwin wrote an interesting post today on [...]
Sigh said
Although the bug report has been marked “fixed” due to a hack in acpi-support that forces it to a more safe mode, now the hard drives are running way too hot and some people are still having problems. Canonical really needs to publish something clearly specifying who’s at fault and what Canonical is going to do about it. If the hard drive manufacturers or BIOS manufacturers can’t or won’t fix it, then Canonical needs to produce workarounds for it. Destroying user’s hardware is unacceptable.