Fedora May Be Killing Your Laptop's Hard Drive?

[Andy Green]

Somebody in the thread at some point said:

>> # hdparm -B 192 /dev/sda
>>
>> for a similar Toshiba drive to mine, and sure enough it stops the
>> Load_Cycle count cranking up here along with the clicking I have
>> suddenly become extremely sensitized to.
>>
>> Apparently you should stick it in /etc/rc.local to make it stick.

> Has this been fixed?

Not AFAIK... the take on it seems to be that if the drive itself or the
bios+drive power it up into a self-destructive state, that is the
problem of the bios+drive.

It's not going to be trivial to "fix" either because different drives
need different magic numbers with hdparm -B

...and there is an argument that it is actually good as it is.  Once I
got my foot tangled in the power cord for this laptop and dashed it on
to the wooden floor here while it was on.  No damage to anything,
including the HDD, presumably because the head was retracted while it
was "idle".  One could argue that the reduction in total lifetime, put
another way a known increase in failure probability over a year or 18
months, is a tradeoff against some "sudden death" protection.

-Andy