Ubuntu bug that shortens life of laptop HDs

[ChiJoan]

[linux] Ubuntu bug that dramatically shortens laptops' HD lifetime
Monday, July 6, 2009 1:20 PM
From:
"Thad Floryan" <thad@thadlabs.com>

linux@yahoogroups.com


The following was just found in another group:

An interesting bug that causes high frequency of of load/unload
cycles on some hard disk may shorten lifetime.

Brief:

current behavior may lead to premature disk failure in laptops
due to excessive and unnecessary drive parking. Fix will disable
disk cycling by default when on AC power, by correcting an error
in the hdparm logic of acpi-support.

Take a look at the issue in detail, bug description and the fix:

<https://bugs. launchpad. net/ubuntu/ +source/acpi- support/+ bug/59695

>

The key focus here should be to understand the 'hdparm' logic
that caused the bug in the first place.

=====I hope it helps alert you to something Puppy can fix if it effects it, too.

Thanks for Puppy....
Joan in Reno

[paulh177]

the link you provide is full of illegal characters, and when corrected leads to an error "There’s no page with this address in Launchpad."

Can you check and repost the link?

thanks

[ChiJoan]

This is where the link goes:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... +bug/59695

I hope this link works for you...

Joan in Reno

PS: To copy and paste would be too lengthy.

JL

[alienjeff]

Yet another vote of no confidence for Ubuntu. Coincidentally, Barry posted this on his developer blog: Cloned distos - why Ubuntu sucks and should be banned. It's well worth the time to read it. And interestingly enough, some of Andreas Hamberger's complaints about cloned distros apply to the Puppy Linux world as well! But the blind faithful in here won't want to admit it ...

[nitehawk]

@alienjeff .....

Thanks for that link,..that's very interesting and informative. No wonder I like basic Debian Lenny.

[ragaman]

Holy **$#**!!!

My laptop's hard drive had just been zapped after 1 week of Ubuntu Jaunty. I thought it was because of age (1-1/2 years old but not that badly used), then I came upon this thread.

I've used Ubuntu from Dapper to Jaunty. Every release has its own quirks and strong points and I'm extremely forgiving when it comes to "sizing up" a distro.

Then I installed Jaunty on four PC's. Things were dandy the first few days. then things started to fall apart. PC1 would suddenly freeze. It doesn't matter what app one is using. It just freezes and only a reboot can revive it.

PC2 started showing apt segmentation fault. Which can be corrected by deleting *bin files from /var/cache/apt. Problem is, everytime I install something, segmentation fault happens again, and again...and again...

PC3- video card went down after 5 days. Can't blame Ubuntu. It was an old ATI 9250

PC4- this is my laptop. Now a dead duck awaiting hard drive replacement.

A British friend of mine also bought a new netbook with Ubuntu as its OS. Its mouse pointer would "get stuck" at the top panel randomly. And only a reboot can "unstuck" it. My friend described his netbook as "the most stupid thing". This was really embarrassing as I was the one who recommended Ubuntu to him.

Yes, you guys are right. Ubuntu is the biggest blight in Linux land.

[jamesbond]

I thought this bug was discovered in pre-hardy ubuntu? I remembered it made a very big slashdot discussion, like, mid 2007, and it was quickly patched? (the launchpad LINK shows first reports came in late 2006 ...)

I run Hardy myself and I don't see this problem on PCs. On laptop it only caused problem in a very specific scenario - and it can fixed by adding one single line in rc.local.

As far as I know Puppy is not affected because Puppy don't do any power management stuff that Ubuntu is doing (well if you want power management you have to set it up yourself). For one thing, Puppy doesn't issue hdparm command (which is the root cause of the problem, IIRC).

cheers!

[Master_wrong]

I read from this site : http://ubuntudemon.wordpress.com/2007/1 ... -affected/

among other thing, it says

"The following things might cause aggressive power management :

* your (laptop) harddrive firmware might have aggressive power management defaults (operating system independent)
* your (laptop) BIOS might set your harddrive to use aggressive power management (operating system independent)
* you might have enabled laptop-mode in /etc/default/acpi-support (disabled by default) which will set your harddrive to use aggressive power management

"

also here some defending for ubuntu : http://ubuntudemon.wordpress.com/2007/1 ... anagement/

If it was firmware/bios that caused the problem, shouldn't we also sniff for potential problem in puppy too ?