Ubuntu Laptop Harddrive

[Matt]

I just installed Ubuntu 7.10 on an Inspiron 600m. How can I find out if this laptop suffers from the "bug" that exerts excessive amounts of strain on the hard drive, and how can I correct this issue?

[iccaros]

I believe that issue has been fixed. I have been running 7.10 for a while now and with no changes, I have not seen the issue. it was with Hitachi drives, and I did not understand it much, Hitachi stated that the drives would be damaged, but powersave was using the setting in the FW of the Hitachi drive.. so it was there drives that had the issue...

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=381...p;postcount=489

Edited April 8, 2008 by iccaros

[Matt]

I installed smartctl to monitor my hard drive load cycle count. It was over 100 a day, so it looks like I was experiencing this issue. I did the following:

make a file named "99-hdd-spin-fix.sh" with the following lines:

#!/bin/sh

hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda

copy this file to 3 locations:

/etc/acpi/suspend.d/

/etc/acpi/resume.d/

/etc/acpi/start.d/

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/a...695/comments/14

According to the bug report, it should be fixed. I will report back tomorrow with an update.

[hitest]

I will report back tomorrow with an update.

Sounds good, Matt:-) I'll be curious to hear how it goes.

[Matt]

Here our my load cycles before the fix was applied:

Day 1: 39834

Day 2: 39935

As you can see, in one day my hard drive spin up reached over 100 in a day.

Then, I applied the fix.

Day 3: 39958

After the fix was applied, my load cycles dropped to 23 that day.

Looks like this did its job.