Is Ubuntu killing hard drives?

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.