Laptop Hardrive Killer Bug - should get critical status

People on the ubuntuforums are worrying about this problem because quite some people seem to be suffering from it. Just do a search for Load_Cycle_Count on the ubuntuforums. Here are some threads as an example :

Harddrive manufacturers seem to claim most harddrives can handle at least 600.000 Load_Cycles but this is probably an average under ideal circumstances. My harddrive started to die slowly when at a Load_Cycle_Count of 200.000.

IMHO this bug should get critical status because it’s killing people’s harddrives.

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

People with laptops who haven’t enabled laptop-mode and think they are suffering from this problem might consider adding the following information to the bug report :

the output of $sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda
the age of your disk
an estimate of the total hours your disk has been running since you started using it (to compare to Power_on_Hours because that value might be off)
an estimate of the average increase of Load_Cycle_Count during one hour on AC (before applying any “ugly” fixes)

I blogged earlier about this problem :

Read here what Matthew Garret an Ubuntu Developer has said about this problem.