Comment 301 for bug 59695

On Dec 14, 2007 2:18 PM, Brian Visel wrote:
>[...]
> Reasonable Limits / Criteria for a fix:
> * There should be fewer than ~15 load cycles per hour, except during heavy usage while on battery.
> * This provides a life expectancy of over four years, which is reasonable for a hard disk.

May be I am just nitpicking, but I think that four years life
expectancy is _not_ reasonable at all. It is absurdly short (even
ignoring the moral and environmental aspects of a consumerist economy
:-) . I own as well as work with many computers and hard drivers older
than four years, and all are in working order. Nobody sane would buy
or use a product which is _designed_ to fail in four years. Perhaps
the business model of the hard drive manufacturers relies on frequent
HDD replacements, but it is not the OS-es place (let alone a free OS
like Ubuntu) to re-infoirce that model.

The life of a hard drive is not controlled by a single parameter, so I
think there should be a safety margin of at least two in all known and
controllable ones (unless the manufacturer specs already include that,
in which case I retract my point). The hardware+OS combo should be
designed to offer at least 10 years life (obviously, unless the laptop
gets dropped) - otherwise, we all know very well, it is just going to
break in two years and exactly when you most need it :-)

regards,
Tzvetan