Default HD power management settings will kill drive
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Ubuntu |
Confirmed
|
Undecided
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Unassigned |
Bug Description
I run feisty (beta) on a Dell Inspiron 9400 with a Hitachi HTS541616J9SA00 hard drive. After booting, the drive's power management settings are such that it spins down A LOT. To give you some statistics: the drive is rated for 600,000 load/unload cycles, and after 2.5 months of running Feisty I'm already at more than 56,000 load/unload cycles (and only 150 power cycles), according to the SMART data. At this rate the drive will be dead after 2.5 years, and I don't even use this computer for more than a couple of hours each day. The fix? I have to do:
hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda
and the spinning-down stops. I don't know what certain other OSes do with their drives at bootup, but the current behaviour is certainly deadly for the drive. Worse: nobody will notice, since smartmontools aren't installed by default. I noticed frequent clicking sounds earlier, but I didn't think those were spindowns since I hadn't specifically set the drive into any low-power mode. I only noticed this by accident after I got smartmontools working.
Running Feisty, Dell XPS M140, with a Hitachi HTS541060G9AT00. Same situation, always noticed LOTS of spindowns but never thought much until it started really bugging me. Installed smartmon and found 154153 load cycles with 308 power cycles.
Running hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda has fixed it for the time being.