That bug (#59695) was hit by slashdot.  It is more relevant, but has
been replaced by a static html page because of the excessive traffic.
I think that is stated earlier in the bug.  

At this point, there is enough information to solve the bug, or at least
to prevent damage to peoples' systems.  This is as clear of an overview
as I can provide in the time I have right now:

- Some hardware vendors set default settings that require certain
behaviours of the operating system -- namely, disk access that is
relatively infrequent (once or twice every five minutes when idle), or
disabling/lessening the aggressiveness of Advanced Power Management
(APM).  If neither of these occur, the hard drive will definitely
(although slowly) be damaged by wear.

- It is apparently the policy of Ubuntu not to mess with hardware
default settings, unless there is some particular purpose.  This has not
been considered an important enough issue to warrant changing the
default settings, but this is ideally due to a lack of understanding of
the real issue (as knowledge can be conveyed).

- Ubuntu accesses the hard disk at least every 30 seconds.  This where
Ubuntu runs into problems.

- Many hardware vendors default to aggressive APM, and Ubuntu keeps that
setting, even while not on battery power.

- Disk Load Cycle Count is the number of times the disk's read/write
heads  have been parked and unparked.  Parking the heads is both a power
saving feature, and (somewhat ironically) a protection against physical
impacts -- because of the latter, it is desirable (but not absolutely
necessary) to keep the heads parked as much as possible.

-  Most laptop drives are rated at around 600,000 load cycles
(approaching this number is approaching disk failure).  This number is a
common number retrieved from various HD specs, such as my own --
http://www.wdc.com/en/library/portable/2879-001121.pdf  Desktop drives
may be more robust, I'm not sure.

- Because of the combination of aggressive power management and frequent
disk activity, the hard disk heads are parked and unparked at least
twice a minute on systems with aggressive APM enabled. 

- 2 parks per minute * 60 minuts per hour * 24 hours per day * 365 days
per year = 1,051,200 -- significantly above a typical rating for a disk.
Of course, this is referring to the time the computer is actually
running, not off time.


The solution is simple, at least in description:
- To ease the minds and hardware of the users, release a package that is
a temporary fix which sets the APM setting to be much less aggressive --
at least to the point where the disk will wait for at least two minutes
of inactivity before parking.  Actually, setting it to wait longer than
~35 seconds will prevent the disks from parking at all, because of how
often Ubuntu accesses the disks.  This is quite simple to implement and
release an update for.

- Then, research and prevent unnecessary disk access, either through the
Laptop Mode tools and kernel settings, or through finding the
applications/processes that are touching the disk on a regular basis,
and modifying them to do so less often.  acpid is one such process (it
unnecessarily logs quite a bit on quite a regular basis in some cases),
but there are others that have a similar effect.  This is much more of a
complex and involved process than simply reducing the aggressiveness of
APM, but it is still a necessary process, if Ubuntu is going to have
power management that works.

- Lastly, perhaps it would be a good idea to create a daemon that
monitors disk usage and modifies settings accordingly.  For example, if
the Load Cycle Count is increasing too rapidly, it could cause the disk
to park less often by modifying the hdparm -B setting.


..that's the current state of things, as far as I can see.

-b