Comment 457 for bug 59695

If Ubuntu can do something, Ubuntu should do something. I agree with that. However, just because a company puts out some buggy hardware, that shouldn't force people with well-behaved hardware to lose power management. And we certainly shouldn't harm the longevity of the drives that were actually built right in order to patch up the drives that weren't. Doing so, and protecting the manufacturers from their own stupidity, would just be begging for more of the same.

Also, if it became a standard behavior for operating systems to disable power management on drives, the manufacturers would just program their new drives to ignore that command. That would be bad for a variety of reasons, including the possibility that this problem still exists, but now there's no workaround.

Remember, this affects ALL operating systems, Windows included. Only Linux distributions have actually done something about it. But even those Linuxes don't fix the problem for everyone and those people that don't need the fix are worse off with it enabled.

Monitoring the load cycles and activating a workaround if they're increasing too fast is a good idea. In fact, it's the first general, workable solution I've seen anyone propose.