Explanation of Ubuntu Hard Drive Wear and Tear

“A recent bug report for Ubuntu Linux has confirmed that both
the Feisty and Gutsy versions of Ubuntu cause some unnecessary wear
and tear on a hard drive. The bug report reads:

“‘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…'”

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