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Ubuntu laptop clan trapped in hard drive hell


spinynorman
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The Ubuntu operating system has been charged with crimes against hard drives. A number of users have complained this week about the OS (7.04/7.10) forcing drives to spin up and down at an unnatural rate due to some very aggressive power management features. According to Ubuntu wizards, however, this is a firmware/BIOS issue and not the OS's fault.

 

Read more at The Register. In the comments, Mandriva's Adam Williamson refutes the suggestion that this is the default setup...

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Yeah... the article is pretty bad and contradicts itself. It has nothing to do with ubuntu, it just so happens that his 'issue' was discovered there first.

 

AdamW's comment gives a better idea of whats up.

...here are the facts.

 

First, it is not accurate to say that "When switching to battery power, /etc/acpi/power.sh issues the command hdparm -B 1 to all block devices". This is not the default configuration of Ubuntu. It only happens when laptop mode is enabled, which must be done manually by the user.

 

In general, Ubuntu does nothing to hard drive power management settings. It leaves them exactly as it receives them, from the machine's BIOS. If your machine's BIOS sets a ridiculously aggressive power management strategy, that is the fault of its manufacturer.

 

This also applies to Mandriva and, I believe, to most other distros.

 

The suggestion that "Of course, your hard drive my eventually catch on fire, which would also lessen its lifespan." is also silly. Take a look at the specs of a typical laptop hard disk:

 

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/5k160/5k160.htm

 

*Maximum* power consumption, at power-on time, is a princely 5W. Consumption in active read / write use is 1.8W. Consumption in active idle mode is 0.8W.

 

An absolutely maximum consumption of 5W and a more usual consumption below 2W is not going to set anything on fire.

 

I might add that it's fine to continue using laptop-mode, just adjust the setting for hdd power management, either turning it off altogether or setting it to 254/255 depending on your hdd.

 

Might be a good idea to edit the topic... it's not ubuntu specific and it's not fair to give them bad press because of others' poor reporting.

 

James

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