Comment 14 for bug 31512

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Mark Thomas (mark-ubuntu-efaref) wrote :

William,

It should work without the hdparm -B 254 workaround. If it doesn't then you have some other program running that is also accessing the disk (suggestions have been thunderbird amongst other things). This is one of those annoying bugs where you have to squash all of them before the problem is fixed. I have managed to do that on my laptop using the acpid workaround - I left it on, idle, overnight, and the load cycle count increased by 1 when the nightly cronjobs kicked in, and then 1 again when I checked the laptop in the morning.

Disabling power-saving operations on the drive is an unsatisfactory workaround imo, as it will reduce battery life, increase general power consumption, and expose the disk to a greater risk of shock damage as the heads are not parked. Maybe someone should put a bounty up for finding and fixing all the idle-writers in Ubuntu.

You are right about there being a cruel irony that, for me at least, acpid with the primary culprit.