Following up on what I wrote yesterday concerning suggested damage to hard disks caused by Ubuntu not altering the number of load unload cycles set by the manufacturers, I noted that a number of people have been suggesting that Ubuntu should take control away from BIOS and carry out these modifications by default, as Windows does.
Well being the kind of person I am I thought I’d do a little investigation. Now after disabling the cycles from Ubuntu, I let the system run for fifteen minutes and noted that there was no increase where previously there had been.
Now I rebooted in Windows Vista Home Premium, let the system run for fifteen minutes and rebooted into Ubuntu. After taking measurements again, surprisingly there was a ten cycle increase.
So the only conclusion I can draw here is that Windows Vista does not alter settings provided from BIOS/microcode either.
Now as to whether or not increased time in the landing zone is detremental to hard disk lifespan is still very much open to interpretation, one thing is true though – the argument that Ubuntu is not doing something that Windows is doing is incorrect.
There was a story posted on Slashdot today with regard to Bug #59695 (No link, intentionally). Apart from the fact that it was extremely poor form to post a link to Launchpad thus slashdotting a major bug tracking tool, this issue should be addressed quickly. Here is the bug report:
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.
Please see for yourself how often your drive is load cycling:
smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sda
(This command is for an SATA drive; you’ll need to install the smartmontools package first.)
See also http://paul.luon.net/journal/hacking/BrokenHDDs.html for a rather dramatic account of the effects the current default values may have.
Just in case the load/unload timeout depends on the specific laptop or disk model, here are my system specifications:
ThinkPad Z60m & Hitachi HTS541080G9SA00 disk (80GB)
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