Ubuntu Power Saver Settings Could Damage Hard Drive

by Riyad Kalla on 30. Oct, 2007 in Technology

It seems that the default ACPI (power saving) settings for hard drives while running on battery power mode could be causing your hard drive to run an insane amount of load cycles, manifesting itself in “clicking” sounds and also the hard drive’s mechanical portions to be stressed quite a bit more than normal and life shortened to around 1yr (give or take).

Michael Baranov was kind enough to post a detailed fix for folks, essentially telling the hard drive to stop spinning down like crazy while running on battery power. The steps are as follows:

  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

  3. Copy this file to 3 locations:

    /etc/acpi/suspend.d/
    /etc/acpi/resume.d/
    /etc/acpi/start.d/

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This post was written by:

Riyad Kalla - who has written 2270 posts on The Buzz Media.

Software development, video games, writing, reading and anything shiny. I ultimately just want to provide a resource that helps people and if I can't do that, then at least make them laugh.

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No Responses to “Ubuntu Power Saver Settings Could Damage Hard Drive”

  1. Erik Weibust 01. Nov, 2007 at 12:47 pm #

    Is this for real or just a bunch of FUD?

    Reply
  2. Riyad Kalla 01. Nov, 2007 at 1:54 pm #

    Erik,
    Seems to be legit. If you read the bug start to finish it’s not *that* bad, it just that the default ACPI settings have Ubuntu spinning down the hard drive *all the time* and then it needs to spin back up… over and over.

    The aggressive power saving features mean the hard drive is doing a shit-ton more heavy lifting mechanically than it should be, wearing it down.

    Reply
  3. Erik Weibust 01. Nov, 2007 at 2:04 pm #

    Ok, but what if I follow you tip. Will I then be wearing out my battery? :)

    Reply
  4. Riyad Kalla 01. Nov, 2007 at 2:10 pm #

    It will use a bit more battery power, but not necessarily wearing it now… sort of like keeping your screen on bright versus dim… keeping it on bright will require you to charge your computer more often, but it’s not necessarily like you are destroying your battery (since they seem to have so many charge cycles of life now).

    Erik if you are thinking about applying these settings, just to get a feel for what others did you might want to read that bug thread. Maybe 15mins worth of reading? Seems most people in the thread turned on the setting with no ill effects. Hard drive just stopped “clicking so much”, I guess meaning it wasn’t parking itself as often them immediately waking itself back up.

    Reply
  5. Bob Moore 13. Apr, 2008 at 12:25 pm #

    My laptop running Ubuntu had hard drive failure after a year or so … and I didn’t abuse it, so have set up this on my new laptop.

    Reply
  6. joggele 24. Feb, 2009 at 5:35 pm #

    it would be mouch better to just change the setting for BATT_HD_POWERMGMT to 128 in “/etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf” or to disaple it in this file by setting it to 255….

    Reply
  7. Chop 31. Aug, 2009 at 8:08 pm #

    Or just uninstall ubuntu-laptop-mode so it doesn’t even mess with it.

    Reply

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