A number of people are blogging about how running the latest version of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon on a laptop could possibly end up causing an early demise of the laptop hard disk. The problem is that the hard disk essentially consists of a spindle and a bunch of disks stacked one on top of the other which rotate at high speeds. Now as with all objects which have moving parts, hard disk also faces wear and tear. The problem faced by Ubuntu laptop users is the aggressive use of hard disk by Ubuntu thus shortening the life of the hard disk.
A bug submitted at launchpad confirms this anomaly. So what is the solution to this rather irritating problem ?
Use hdparm; a command line tool to disable advanced power management (APM). This is achieved by running the following command :
$ sudo hdparm -B 255 /dev/sdaHere the -B option is used to set the APM value. A low value means aggressive power management (that translates to more wear and tear for your hard disk) and a high value means better performance (but more battery consumption). By setting the value as 255, we have disabled the APM all together. Over 2 years back, I had written an article explaining how to improve your hard disk performance using hdparm. And if you are interested in knowing more about hdparm, you may read the article.
I run Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon and it doesn't cause this problem on my desktop PC.
Check out the opinions from two sources [ linux hero and Planet Beranger ] to get a different angle.
5 comments:
That is interesting. I don't keep my laptop on always, so it's ok for me, but I didn't know Gutsy created this problem. Thanks for the info.
Not sure, but does this parking/unparking thing only happen so aggressively when running on the battery? My laptop, which has had ubuntu on it since 6.06 came out, doesn't seem to have this problem, but it also never runs on the battery. AC power only. My desktop with ubuntu also has been immune.
I would assume that disabling APM also means that one might expect shorter battery life so it's not really a bug but a decision made by Ubuntu which places a higher priority on battery life than hdd life.
If your task is one that has long periods of hdd inactivity such as watching a DVD, APM may be desirable.
Actually, this appears to be a standard laptop BIOS/firmware setting, on both windows and Linux, and probably OSX too.
I don`t think that it`s Ubuntu bug, but mostly wrong hdparm settings. In my Debian box, hdparm tells that APM in my HDD is 128. So what?
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