Fedora May Be Killing Your Laptop's Hard Drive?

[Alan Cox]

> not applicable to a drive as part of a computer system.  Manufacturers
> may well preset a drive to go to sleep / be protective, fairly soon,
> expecting computer OSs to configure the drive to best fit into the OS's
> usual manner of using drives.  Some computer OSs (or, more to the point,
> their configurations), do actually set the drive differently than the
> defaults.

No. The ATA philosophy is pretty much "don't break DOS". DOS and Windows
95/98 don't know this stuff so you can't assume the OS will touch it.

> deliberately using it) at boot time, or have a SMART daemon
> configuration that throws up a warning about there being a very large
> number of head parks within a short time period, the same as you get
> warnings about read errors, etc., prompting users to reconfigure the
> settings themselves, as best suited their own needs.

Not a bad idea at all - file bug/send patches.

Alan