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73416ba
(Get the code!)
This is most definitely a "bug" in the hard drive firmware settings in how quickly it parks the head after being idle. It affects MacOS X and Windows users along with Linux users in general not just Ubuntu. I have found posts on other sites referencing the problems for their users as well. The only thing those users were able to do about fixing the problem was to turn off the power management completely by doing the equivalent of hdparm -B 254 (setting the register to 0xFE). I have included links below referencing the problem showing up on the other OSes.
Completely disabling power management however will cause the head never to park and if the system is jolted could potentially cause the hard drive heads to crash into the platter. So 'fixing' this across the board by disabling head parking altogether is not really a good solution either.
Probably the only reason some users don't see this behavior under Windows but do under Linux is that their Windows install probably never allows the drive to be idle enough to park the head. This was the case on my machine before I cleaned off the OEM install which had lots of bloatware on it and reinstalled Vista from scratch, it would never stop writing to the disk. Which would also mean if the drive is jolted too hard it would crash as well. So no Windows doesn't have this problem 'fixed'.
My post on ubuntuforums.org about it:
http://
MacOS X:
http://
Windows:
http://
So the ball is in the manufacturer's court in that they need to adjust the head parking idle time to something more sensible, or at least provide utilities that can allow the user to tweak the setting. Hitachi for one does not provide this ability.