Is Ubuntu killing harddrives with extremely frequent load cycles?

There are at least two bug reports at launchpad that I have found that address a very urgent problem for laptop owners. This is a very concerning issue that does not yet seem to be resolved.

note: these are not my fixes. I’m just spreading the word.

bug # 104535
also see the wikipage

bug #59695 poster reports:
Please see for yourself how often your drive is load cycling
sudo smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sda
(This command is for an SATA drive; you’ll need to install the smartmontools package first.)

In my case, I had to change the “sda” to “hda“.

Here’s the temporary fix that has been posted on the bug # 59695 page and another, more in depth explanation.

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 /dev/sda

[my note, 255 disables APM, but doesn't work for all. If you see no results, try 254, which is the least aggressive setting. I can confirm that 254 seems to be working for me. The load cycle has not increased in 10 minutes after changing to 254!]

3) copy this file to 3 locations:
/etc/acpi/suspend.d/
/etc/acpi/resume.d/
/etc/acpi/start.d/

Here’s my load count using the 255 setting (which didn’t work on my compaq presario v5000 laptop.

193 Load_Cycle_Count 0×0032 086 086 000 Old_age Always – 142407

(5 minutes later – before changing my hdparm settings):
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0×0032 086 086 000 Old_age Always – 142439

(5 minutes after changing the hdparm to -B 255 (it obviously isn’t working):
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0×0032 086 086 000 Old_age Always – 142447

(…and again a few minutes later):
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0×0032 086 086 000 Old_age Always – 142468

(but after changing the hdparm to -B 254, the load cycle seems to be holding steady):

note: It appears that doing everything that was suggested here does not work after rebooting. I’m going to have to look into this more to confirm, but for now, after rebooting I noticed that the load cycle had continued to sky rocket until I ran one of the scripts I had added to /dev/acpi/[start,resume,ac,suspend,battery].d directories.