- keep it running all of its life. No matter if you need to read it or not
- turn it off (well.. spindown) as soon as possible. Turn it on again as needed
Spinup, in fact, is quite expensive for and harddrive and, by design, it has been tested only for a limited number of spindown-up sequence.
So, if you don't need to strictly preserve your laptop battery, please leave it turned on!
Why Ubuntu can be a HDD serial killer?
Because, by design, it spins down your drive quite often. Open a terminal and try the following command line
sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep -i "Start_Stop_Count\|Load_Cycle_Count\|Power_On_Hours"
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0012 097 097 000 Old_age Always - 5238
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0012 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 719
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0012 095 095 000 Old_age Always - 55359
As you can see, in my 1-year old laptop, I got nearly 720 hours of work but 5238 (!!!) power sequence and 55359 load cycle.
It's like I've turned on (or put in standby) my laptop 15 times at day, each day (even Christmas) for the last year!
How to change this?
I've found this solution, which is also useful for manage your battery consciously
- install laptop-mode tools
- edit /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf with your preferred application ad look for BATT_HD_POWERMGMT settings. If it's 1 be prepared for early disk death!
- change to a reasonable value (like 100, 254 is the highest while 255 disable power management at all). man hdparm at -B switch will help you in understanding this value
- save the file and type
This will apply the changes.
Just to be sure, type
sudo hdparm -B /dev/sda
To check the value applied.
Long life to your laptop's HDD!
