Comment 355 for bug 59695

I've been doing some research on this issue, and the Debian fix (hdparm of 254 I believe) would seem to have a lot going for it. Google, in a massive study on hard drives, says

"One of our key findings has been the lack of a consistent pattern of higher failure rates for higher temperature drives or for those drives at higher utilization levels. Such correlations have been repeatedly highlighted by previous studies, but we are unable to confirm them by observing our population." (http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf)

So higher temperatures and longer running time may not really be affecting our drives hardly at all. Also, if the drives are forced to write very frequently because ext3, there's a very small chance our drives won't be engaged in the event of a fall. I doubt a user would blame Ubuntu if they dropped their laptop and their hard drive was damaged. They WOULD blame Ubuntu if it failed years before it would have under Windows.

So given that temperature and runtime don't seem to affect the drives significantly, and the drives are engaged nearly all the time, thus negating any benefit of parking, is there any reason not to run at 254 or 255 depending?