Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1762031AbXKDACy (ORCPT ); Sat, 3 Nov 2007 20:02:54 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1756919AbXKDACr (ORCPT ); Sat, 3 Nov 2007 20:02:47 -0400 Received: from france.micfo.com ([87.117.253.20]:59415 "EHLO france.micfo.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1756552AbXKDACq (ORCPT ); Sat, 3 Nov 2007 20:02:46 -0400 X-Greylist: delayed 3608 seconds by postgrey-1.27 at vger.kernel.org; Sat, 03 Nov 2007 20:02:46 EDT From: Alberto Gonzalez To: Linux Kernel Mailing List Subject: Laptop's HDD Date: Sun, 4 Nov 2007 00:02:25 +0100 User-Agent: KMail/1.9.7 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200711040002.25784.info@gnebu.es> X-AntiAbuse: This header was added to track abuse, please include it with any abuse report X-AntiAbuse: Primary Hostname - france.micfo.com X-AntiAbuse: Original Domain - vger.kernel.org X-AntiAbuse: Originator/Caller UID/GID - [47 12] / [47 12] X-AntiAbuse: Sender Address Domain - gnebu.es X-Source: X-Source-Args: X-Source-Dir: Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1835 Lines: 42 Hi, Maybe some of you have been hearing lately about a problem with laptop's hard disk drives being killed by *insert Linux distro here* [1] The problem comes from a very high rate of load/unload cycles of the heads that reaches the 300.000-600.000 limit in 2-3 years (with smartmontools it can checked it with "smartctl -A /dev/sda") . There are reports of HDD dying even earlier for this problem [2] For what I've read, it's not that Linux is doing anything special to your hard disk, it's the BIOS settings that take care of killing your disk sooner than later. However, I'm asking on this list because the problem seems to have started with kernel 2.6.10 [3]. Windows seems to override the BIOS settings, so hardware vendors have never cared about this problem. So my question is: Is this something the (Linux) kernel should care about or should distributions care about it with userspace tools? By the way, this settings seem to be there in order to save power. However, loading/unloading the heads ~3 times per minute doesn't seem like a very good powersaving policy. Couldn't this be one of the reasons why Linux is using generally more power than Windows? Regards, Alberto. [1] - http://beranger.org/index.php?page=diary&2007/10/24/18/07/21 - http://ubuntudemon.wordpress.com/2007/10/26/laptop-hardrive-killer-bug/ [2] - http://ubuntudemon.wordpress.com/2007/10/27/laptop-hardrive-killer-bug-is-worse-than-i-thought/#comment-31490 http://paul.luon.net/journal/hacking/BrokenHDDs.html [3] - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2005-March/msg00463.html - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/