I run feisty (beta) on a Dell Inspiron 9400 with a Hitachi HTS541616J9SA00 hard drive. After booting, the drive's power management settings are such that it spins down A LOT. To give you some statistics: the drive is rated for 600,000 load/unload cycles, and after 2.5 months of running Feisty I'm already at more than 56,000 load/unload cycles (and only 150 power cycles), according to the SMART data. At this rate the drive will be dead after 2.5 years, and I don't even use this computer for more than a couple of hours each day.”
It appears that there is a bug in Fiesty and Gusty which results in a lot of hard-disk Load\Unload operations that reduces the life of the disk drastically. This usually happens is the "Laptop Mode" is enabled along with Advanced Power Management.
Some developers have suggested a fix to disable APM for the drive which can be done by using:
$sudo hdparam -B 255 /dev/hda OR /dev/sda (if you have a serial ATA drive)A value of 255 disables the APM which means that you might end up with a less battery life. If you want you can give a better figure (some guys have given 254, the value 1 is supposedly causing the problem).
Installing smartmontools is a good idea, as suggested by this Linux Journal article.
$sudo apt-get install smartmontoolsUpdate:
More talk and suggestions here. The problem was slashdot(ed) yesterday!!
