I wrote a story on microprocessors once. Paper would have been better - The Evil Dr Spinola
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Ubuntu eats your laptop's hard-drive
RUNNING your laptop on the user friendly Ubuntu Linux could shorten the life span of your hard-drive.
According to the bugs forum at Launchpad, , when you switch to battery power on an Ubuntu laptop the hard drive goes though a load cycle a minute.
A standard laptop can handle about a 600,000 cycles in its lifetime which means that you will need a new hard drive every 1.1 years.
The problem appears to be the default values set by the hard
drive makers. Voleware ignores the default values and just runs its own,
however it seems that Ubuntu made the grave mistake of doing what the hard drive
manufacturers told them.
There are workarounds for the problem which involve disabling the
defaults.
According to one bod on Slashdot it can be done by doing the following:
Make a file named "99-hdd-spin-fix.sh".
In the file write the following lines:
#!/bin/sh and hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda. Save the file to three locations,
/etc/acpi/suspend.d/, /etc/acpi/resume.d/ and
/etc/acpi/start.d/.
Then you should be ok, he thinks. µ
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... but if you were using another OS, you wouldn't have the problem... 

But it's not their fault! Really!

Linux developers are the world's experts at offloading blame onto third parties.
The -B255 option simply turns off all advanced power management on the hard drive! ... How can that be a good thing?

I have checked this on my laptop and my hard drive has this problem and has the power management value set at "128" (0 is best power saving, 255 is best performance). Are you saying that if I put it to full power saving then maybe it'll only last 6 months?!

Why is everyone bandying about this stupid cludge. Surely what is needed is actually to stop linux from flushing it's disk logs every few seconds so the drive can power down and stay powered down... I'm reconning that I can sort it out by playing with noflushd ... I foolishly thought Ubuntu would have already sorted out things like that for me.
The "problem" is not actually a problem at all but rather a feature of the ext3 filesystem. Every 5 seconds it syncs it's journals, obviously if the disk is asleep it must wake it to do this and being a very low level process it makes sure it happens.

The solution is simply to increase the sync time by adding a "commit=xxx" line into the fstab where xxx is the number of seconds (I use 300 = 5 minutes) - do this for any ext3 drive that is mounted. I have done this on my laptop and using "smartctl" I can see that the load cycle is now only going up around once every 5 minutes.

5 seconds to 5 minutes may sound extreme, but if you are on a laptop you do not have to worry about random power outs so the only possible loss of data would be from a crash and we all know linux doesn't crash ;o)

Inquirer please spread the word!! Please post another article with this fix, everyone is looking in the wrong place (i.e. at the power management settings for a "fix" to this "bug"), if I can't publicise this fix enough everyone is going to just keep posting the stupid fix of turning off the power saving, which would give us all shorter battery lives :O(
I know the 1st comment covers everything that everyone needs to know. BUT o come on!!!!!! iT says in the article that it is a firmware issue.
@Jon Cooper

Ubuntu might not be directly causing it, but Ubuntu is directly avoiding dealing with it. So we could say, it's Windows fault for "just working well" instead of doing what Ubuntu is doing to help the situation, "nothing at all".

Confirmed to be a generic bug, caused by the laptop BIOS or other settings, rather than Ubuntu's "fault". See:

http://ubuntudemon.wordpress.com/2007/10/30/ubuntu-is-not-causing-aggressive-power-management/
As per the Leopard BSOD problem. Is it the OS manufacturer's fault? No, it isn't.

Should they fix it anyway? Yes - just like Microsoft has to work round shitty hardware and software.

Just like all the Unixes already do with duff hard disk controllers and suchlike. it's a universal problem, and the OS manufacturer needs to resolve it.
While one might make the case 'its not Ubuntu's' fault, or I should say 'Linux' and Other operating systems fault, the OS installed plays a part.

Its been raised as a bug since 2005. And if you are heading up Ubuntu, a linux for the masses, you can't logically expert end users to start getting hands dirty fixing something that is handled by the OS.

And power management IS handled by the OS. If something is going badly wrong, the OS has to handle it. That is its job. 

Other OS's have handled it, because we know Windows tends to work around the issue. What people need to think is along these lines:-

If people were paying for this, or if we had partners (which in terms of Dell, Ubuntu now has), or if we simply want to match the deeds to the aspiriration of being a User OS, then we have to sort it. 

If the answer is to hide behind comments like 'The user can fix it themself.', or 'Its free, we offer no warranty', or 'Its someone else's fault', these are all passing the buck. Sorry, but they are. 

It needs fixing, its needed fixing since 2005, and the time and excuses are running out. No vendor is going to want Ubuntu OR other OSS software if the software actually leads to a senario where customers are returning product. It does not matter who's fault it is, what matters is Ubuntu is there on the system and failing to do the jo9b required of the OS - ie, look after IO without serious problem.
See also here:
http://www.advogato.org/person/mjg59/diary/82.html