Ninja Blogging

I bug has been confirmed where Feisty and Gutsy versions of Ubuntu are allowing hard drives to spin down to conserve power and causing excessive wear. In short a drive has an average number of load/unload cycles before it wears out. If the drive isn’t allowed to spin down during use, then there are less load/unload cycles which extends it’s life. It’s not clear whether desktops are affected or not since it’s the Advanced Power Management that is allowing the drive to spin down, and thus extending battery life. I’m not sure why one would put trust into a “Mechanical”
Hard disk Drive to archive data, so as long as you make frequent backups it shouldn’t be a huge deal. But it’s nice to be aware that your Hard disk may not last as long as one would expect.