Ubuntu May Be Killing Your Laptop's Hard Drive 419
wwrmn writes "There's a debate going on over at bugs.launchpad.net on whether it's the Ubuntu, BIOS, hard-drive manufacturer, or pick-any-player's fault, but Ubuntu (and perhaps any OS) may be dramatically shortening the life of your laptop's hard drive due to an aggressive power-saving feature / acpi bug / OS configuration. Regardless of where the fault lies or how it's fixed, you might want to take some actions now to try to prevent the damage."
Thanks for slashdotting launchpad, guys. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The Ubuntu (Score:3, Informative)
Old news??? (Score:5, Informative)
Selected Excerpts (Score:5, Informative)
When switching to battery power,
The command hdparm -b 255 turn off completely APM.
Here is how I permanently fixed it:
1) make a file named "99-hdd-spin-fix.sh". The important thing is starting with "99".
2) make sure the file contains the following 2 lines (fix it if you have PATA HDD):
#!/bin/sh
hdparm -B 255
3) copy this file to 3 locations:
Voila! After that the HDD never spins down on power (looks like it actually spins down on battery at modest rate).
Sorry if the instruction is too detailed, no offense.
An alternative to the "99-hdd-spin-fix.sh" fix is to install and enable the package laptop-mode-tools,
then customize
Re:The Ubuntu (Score:5, Informative)
Set Advanced Power Management feature, if the drive supports it. A low value means aggressive power management and a high value means better performance. A value of 255 will disable apm on the drive.
I would say blame the hard drive vendor.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Read some of the Ubuntu forums (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The Ubuntu (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The Ubuntu (Score:5, Informative)
In answer to your question about how this isn't Ubuntu's fault, apparently the problem is that the manufacturer sets certain default values for "aggressive power management" and enables this aggressive power management by default. Ubuntu's policy is to not change the manufacturer defaults, and simply uses them. Unfortunately these defaults are "too aggressive" and cause the hard drive to park/unpark too frequently.
But Ubuntu is not blameless. First of all, if Ubuntu can push out a patch that resets the manufacturer defaults to sane values (and this will save some people from hard drive failures), then it definitely should. Also, there is some discussion that perhaps an Ubuntu daemon is probing the hard disk too frequently, so that the hard-drive can't sit in the parked state for long enough to actually make it a useful feature.
Regardless of who is to blame, it would appear that the Ubuntu devs should push out a patch that forces systems to ignore the manufacturer values, and use settings that will protect the drive lifetime.
Cheap test.. (Score:5, Informative)
Run this every hour and compare differences in the load count (the last value in the output written to the file 'load_count' in the current directory).. Replace
echo `sudo smartctl -a
If the difference in this count is more than 90 from one hour to the next you may be in trouble if there is anything to this wear and tear fear.
Re:That's not what I'm worried about (Score:3, Informative)
It shows two screens, and you can dual screen it or switch screens from the control panel. You may have to restart X for changes to take effect, however it is much better than it used to be. I had no problems selecting the right resolution for my computer (1280x1024).
AS for the hard drive throttling, that could be a serious issue, and one I am sure they will try to fix asap, especially with a Long Term Support version coming up next. They want that thing as bug free and stable as it can get, and something like this could hurt their rep. On the other hand, who's to say other OS's/distros aren't doing the same thing?
Re:The Ubuntu (Score:5, Informative)
# -B 255 doesn't work for me
sda_args="-B 254 -S 60"
to
# redo hdparm settings on resume
after running
The key thing here is to run hdparm on boot *and* on resume
Re:AHA! :D (Score:3, Informative)
Re:This thread sucks... (Score:4, Informative)
> legendary thread, with viciously bashing comments, insightfully (40%) funny (20%) attacks
> against MS, Vista drama etc.
Of course, because all laptops are DESIGNED for Windows so if it doesn't work abuse and ridicule should be heaped on them if it was hitting multiple hardware vendors with the only common factor the OS vendor.
But this case is tricky. I just read through the thread and most people there are paniced sheep just turning off all power management because they don't EVER want the hdd to unload. They don't understand the three year replacement cycle all PC hardware is designed around, it is BUILT to FAIL. Looks like there IS a problem of some sort though because some people are reporting unload followed almost instantly by a load. But power management remains one of the areas of PCs that vary wildly in totally undocumented ways not only from vendor to vendor and model to model but from minor BIOS revisions. It is a non-trivial problem.
Re:The Ubuntu (Score:1, Informative)
# redo hdparm settings on resume
in
Re:no problem, really! (Score:5, Informative)
You may not have to. My Toshiba Satellite M45 has been running Ubuntu since Edgy, 6.10 and has a "Load_Cycle_Count" of 5,416. Maybe the default install does not have this issue? Maybe you have to install some other package to create the problem? It's not "laptop-mode-tools" because I have that installed. Do you have to be on battery power?
It's still 5,416.
From the horses mouth (Score:5, Informative)
Matthew garret, who runs the laptop testing team. Read this, instead of just spreading FUD.
noatime by itself doesn't make a difference (Score:3, Informative)
Re:wow, I had Ubuntu kill a laptop hard drive . . (Score:3, Informative)
Time to try the fix, once the site comes back up from oblivion.
Re:Confused.... (Score:2, Informative)
I have Zonk unchecked. Forget why.
Re:The Ubuntu (Score:5, Informative)
It is NOT Ubuntu (Score:5, Informative)
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 001 001 000 Old_age Always - 2144751
That is 2,144,751 in case the lack of commas throws you. This is just a tad more than the 600,000 that was mentioned in the original bug report, so I don't know out of who's hat that number was pulled.
For completeness, here is the drive info.
Model Family: Seagate Momentus 7200.1 series
Device Model: ST96023AS
Serial Number: 3MG06BZ3
Firmware Version: 4.06
This is not an Ubuntu problem. Read the references (Score:5, Informative)
=====================
Linux-hero wrote about how Ubuntu kills your hard drive. The situation is somewhat less clear than you might think from the article, but the basic takeaway message is that Ubuntu doesn't touch your hard drive power management settings by default. In almost all cases, it's more likely to be your BIOS or the firmware on your hard drive.
The script that's executed when you plug or unplug your laptop is
function laptop_mode_enable {
$HDPARM -S $SPINDOWN_TIME
$HDPARM -B 1
}
That is, when the laptop_mode_enable function is called, we set the drive power parameters. Now, by default laptop_mode_enable isn't called:
if [ x$ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE = xtrue ]; then
(sleep 5 && laptop_mode_enable)&
fi
because ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE is false in the default install (check
If you enable laptop mode, then we will enable aggressive power management on the drive and that may lead to some reduction in hard drive lifespan. That's a fairly inevitable consequence of laptop mode, since it only makes sense if the laptop enages in aggressive power management. But, as I said, that's not the default behaviour of Ubuntu.
There's certainly an argument that we should work around BIOSes, but in general our assumption has been that your hardware manufacturer has a better idea what your computer is capable of than we do. If a laptop manufacturer configures your drive to save power at the cost of life expectancy, then that's probably something you should ask your laptop manufacturer about.
=====================
Don't fall prey to 'Digg-ish' sensationalism. You all are supposed to know better over here.
Re:This is not an Ubuntu problem. Read the referen (Score:3, Informative)
http://mjg59.livejournal.com/77672.html [livejournal.com]
Re:The Ubuntu (Score:2, Informative)
Bull. The OS should NOT be mucking around with changing low-level hardware device settings. Ubuntu is doing EXACTLY what they should be doing in honoring the existing hardware configuration, whether set by the manufacturer or directly by the user. This 'bug' is FUD pure and simple from people who understand just enough to be dangerous.
Now if there is, in fact a daemon causing too frequent disk access for power management to work properly, then that bug should be fixed. Pushing a patch to change people's power management settings is exactly the wrong thing to do as it treats the symptom, not the cause. I've had this same behavior on my XP laptop too, but recognized that it was a bug in a program and took steps to fix the program. If Windows had automatically changed my drive's power management settings I'd both likely not noticed the bug in the program AND had worse battery life. Yeah!
Don't use -B 255, use -B 254 instead (Score:5, Informative)
This shows on all three laptops that the load counts increases by 1 to 4 every minute.
Now I issued:
This has stopped load cycles on two drives.The third one (the TOSHIBA MK6006GAH) still continues loading and unloading like hdparm did not help at all.
However, setting the power-management level to "lowest power savings mode" with:
did prevent any more load/unload cycles from happening.So in summary:
Re:The Ubuntu (Score:1, Informative)
The comments in the bug report speculate that Windows either completely ignores this feature, or ignores the manufacturer values and uses its own values. (In either case, what's the point in having BIOS set defaults?)
Uhm. The OS doesn't actually issue the command to the disk, you know. The disk has it's own defaults. And does the sanity stuff by itself. The OS however, might _overwrite_ those things, and ask the disk to "hey, behave more nicely, will you? I'm not interested in you burning out. Use these values instead you idiot.".
The more likely explanation is that the manufacturer set the defaults, but didn't notice that the values were unsafe because Windows ignores them.
If windows ignores them, the disk continues to do it - so no, no game for you.
Re:Ubuntu FOUND the problem (Score:4, Informative)
You can set that as high as you want, and the drive will still use its internal setting to sleep more frequently if it is configured to. All the windows setting does is set how long Windows will wait before sending an explicit command to the drive to tell it to sleep.
Nice guess though.
Re:The Ubuntu (Score:3, Informative)
You could tune a notebook mode to eliminate most or all of the web browser disk accesses, turn off history, caching, swapping to disk, etc. However, especially with a notebook, you would want aggressive autosaving in case the battery suddenly dies.
Re:My experience (Score:4, Informative)
far more useful in SMART are the VALUE WORST THRESH and TYPE columns. Since Load_Cycle_Count is an Old_age value, and the THRESH is 0, it means that it starts at 100 and goes down as the drive ages. When it reaches 0 it means the drive manufacturer believes that is roughly equivalent to the useful duty life of the drive.
Currently yours is on 86, so it's actually only down 14%, which gives you nearly 3 more years of likely life from it. That is about typical of modern laptops afaics.
A far more useful test here would be to run the same test on Ubuntu and Windows on the same hardware (there is a smartctl port at http://hdparm-win32.dyndns.org/hdparm/ [dyndns.org] )
Given that Ubuntu does not change the disk power management settings in your BIOS and/or hard disk firmware, the only variable here is whether or not Windows overrides those settings with more or less conservative values than the existing defaults (and of course it's possible that your OEM pre-installs with other settings than Windows would natively choose on a vanilla install).
For all of the screaming and wailing about Ubuntu killing disks I have not seen a single post anywhere where anyone has posted any kind of hard data that Ubuntu is behaving in any way differently to other operating systems. Ergo this is still very very much unproven - unless anyone can link to something that says otherwise?
Cheers,
Re:Ubuntu FOUND the problem (Score:3, Informative)
HD Tune and Speedfan are among the better utils:
http://www.hdtune.com/ [hdtune.com]
http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php [almico.com]
Re:My experience (Score:4, Informative)
Not Just Ubuntu (Score:3, Informative)
hdparm -B 255 (Score:3, Informative)
but there is more, power mode status
and of course spindown timer So there is a middle ground, if your drive supports it, hdparm -I will also yeild some interesting information about what features the drive will support. Just turning the power management off seems like a bit of a knee jerk reaction, especially when adjusting the amount of power management applied to the drive should deliver both i.e hdparm -B 196 YMMV.I would have thought that spindown timer would be more relevant to apply, one other thing I've never found hard drives tuned to thier maximum throughput in a linux installation (I mainly use Fedora) so an investigation of the udma modes your drive will support may be a worthwhile investment in time see hdparm -X _some_number_here_ (RTFM - first) considering just about everything goes better when you do tune it right.