Comment 81 for bug 59695

IMHO this bug should get critical status because it's killing people's harddrives.

I previously reported about a problem I had with my harddrive : https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.22/+bug/151938
Turns out the harddrive was dying. I confirmed it with Samsung's hutil 2.0.3 from the Ultimate Boot CD. Now I am the proud owner of a Western Digital WD2500BEVS. I have had laptop-mode enabled for a long time. Apparantly this caused my harddrive to get a Load_Cycle_Count of 241.493 in 1 year time. This is what probably caused my harddrive problems.

I think we can dissect the bug into the following parts :

* harddrive firmware should use sane defaults for power management (contact your harddrive manufacturer if you don't use laptop-mode and suffer from this problem)

* the BIOS shouldn't set the amount of power management of your harddrive (contact your BIOS manufacturer if your harddrive manufacturer isn't the one to blame)

* aggressive power management settings (set by your harddrive's firmware or your BIOS) should be detected and handled

* laptop-mode should be less aggressive about power management in the meantime you shouldn't enable it

* if the hdparm service is enabled then hdparm should load the settings from /etc/hdparm.conf after resuming frome suspend-to-ram and hibernate-to-disk

* the top causes for hard drive wake up should be found

* smartmontools should be installed on default. smartd should run on default with sane settings hooking into a notifier to notify users
 o if the Load_Cycle_Count is increased with more than 90 cycles within 24 hours
 o if smartctl thinks your harddrive assess your harddrive as not healthy
 o if more than X errors where found during the last self-test

Regarding smartd hooking into a notifier I found the following wiki pages with similar ideas :
 * https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDownUnder/BOFs/SMARTMonitoring
 * https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DiskMonitoring