Fedora May Be Killing Your Laptop's Hard Drive?

[Konstantin Svist]

Timothy Murphy wrote:
> There has been a recent scare posting on SlashDot,
> (quoting <https://launchpad.net/bug59695.html>)
> "Ubuntu May Be Killing Your Laptop's Hard Drive",
> suggesting that Ubuntu
> "may be dramatically shortening the life of your laptop's 
> hard drive due to an aggressive power-saving feature".
>
> It wasn't clear to me if the action described
> is actually restricted to Ubuntu,
> or is common to all Linux distributions.
>
> Does it in fact affect Fedora?
>
>
>   

Was just reading the same article. The bug description mentions that you 
can check your HD's S.M.A.R.T. attributes with a command like
smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sda

Mine says something in the order of 300k, half the lifespan of the drive :(
I've ran Fedora 5, then 6 on my laptop since I purchased it just over 1 
year ago.

To answer your question: yes, it seems that Fedora has this problem, too.

It may not be Linux/distro- specific, however: some BIOS updates 
supposedly help (see 
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_hard_drive_clicking)