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-60

Extend hard drive warranties for Ubuntu PC's

-60 points posted to Inspiron products, Linux by johnnyk 12/17/07

It has recently come to light that the hard drives of Ubuntu-based PC's can wear down very quickly (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/acpi-support/+bug/59695)

The average life expectancy of a hard drive is 600,000 load cycles. Since June '07, my Inspiron E1505n (which came with Ubuntu preinstalled) has already accumulated 471,202. If the load cycles continue to increase at this pace, the hard drive will be dead within a year.

My point in this idea is to say that Dell has a responsibility to insure it's hardware. It goes without saying that Dell should replace the hard drives of computers under warranty, but I think that Dell should extend the benefit of hard drive replacement to anyone who bough an Ubuntu machine and lost a hard drive as a result, even after the warranty has expired. Does Dell have an obligation to replace the dead hard drives of Ubuntu machines past warranty? No, of course not. But at the same time, Dell has to realize that if it wants to be taken seriously as a manufacturer, it needs to test its hardware-software combination before shipping. And if for some reason a major issue slips through the testing process, Dell has to realize that it bares some responsibility and should, for the benefit of its customers and its reputation, rectify the problem.

xtcpc
12/17/07		 Hard Drive replacement should not be needed with proper use and care. Take a look at the following workaround and see if this may fix the issue:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/acpi-support/+bug/59695/comments/14
jervis961
12/17/07		 Reading through the post they have a software work around suggested there. Seems like a software issue as otherwise it would affect the drive on any OS. Extended warranty should cover replacement.
jmxz
12/17/07		 Agreed that it's a software issue.

It might be nice if Dell had some widget pre-installed on Ubuntu where they can push messages to their customers (like I think they do for Windows users) to inform them of such workarounds.
johnnyk
12/17/07		 @xtcpc - Most people won't know about the workaround. And for people that do, most would enable it only after a large amount of load cycles have accumulated. I myself did enable the workaround, but that can't reverse the fact that almost 80% of the load cycles have already been used up.

@jervis961 and jmxz - I have heard some people explain that they believe it is caused by the hard drive's firmware, but some others disagree and say that it is only a software issue. Either way, I believe Dell would replace the drive if it were to die during the warranty. But like I said, even if people do enable the workaround, most of the damage will have already been done. With the workaround, the drive will likely live past the warranty expiration, but would still have a shorter lifespan than those drives not affected by the bug in the first place. For that reason, I think Dell should extend all warranty coverage regarding hard drive failure for the Ubuntu PC's.
aikiwolfie
12/17/07		 It's definitely a software issue and a work around has been produced as detailed in the link posted in the idea. It also only seems to affect certain hard drives. I'll be keeping this in mind in case any of my hard drives die unexpectantly. I doubt it will happen though. I've only had HDs die on me a few times and they were old drives.
johnnyk
12/17/07		 You all make the point that this is a software issue (which seems to be true) but that isn't the point really.

What's important is that this issue affects Dell's hardware. My point in this idea is to say that Dell has a responsibility to insure it's hardware. It goes without saying that Dell should replace the hard drives of computers under warranty, but I think that Dell should extend the benefit of hard drive replacement to anyone who bough an Ubuntu machine and lost a hard drive as a result, even after the warranty has expired. Does Dell have an obligation to replace the dead hard drives of Ubuntu machines past warranty? No, of course not. But at the same time, Dell has to realize that if it wants to be taken seriously as a manufacturer, it needs to test its hardware-software combination before shipping. And if for some reason a major issue slips through the testing process, Dell has to realize that it bares some responsibility and should, for the benefit of its customers and its reputation, rectify the problem.

Do you at least agree with me on that?
jmxz
12/18/07		 Interestingly, the Ubuntu forums suggest that the "software problem" in Ubuntu is that by Default Ubuntu leaves the default power-management setting (which apparently can live in the bios as well as the firmware, etc) untouched. The default on many laptops and laptop hard drives seems to be to have pretty aggressive power management settings. Arguably this is a good thing, though - since a spun down drive is more resistant to damage from dropping a laptop, etc; as well as saving power, etc.

A second "software problem" in Ubuntu is that it accesses the disk like crazy - zillions of silly processes effectively writing "yeah, I'm still here" to log files - zillions of silly processes poling for random crap on the disk - apparently even power management "features" spinning up the drive for no good reason. I'd say this is the far more serious bug; because I want my laptop to put it's drives in the more damage-resistant and more power-saving mode when it can.

I wonder what other Dell-pre-installed OS's like FreeDOS do about it. My guess is that they just don't spin up the disk as much, no?

Some of the better links I see on the issue:
http://ubuntudemon.wordpress.com/2007/10/30/ubuntu-is-not-causing-aggressive-...
http://lwn.net/Articles/257426/

The workaround for people who haven't found it yet:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=3675960&postcount=26< agree failures within the warranty period can (and already do) get handled by the existing warranty. But if your software is driving the disks very hard (even for silly reasons like ubuntu seems to be doing) it doesn't seem to me to be a reason to get free extensions.

Perhaps an option where Dell will sell extended warranties to those people would be the most fair to everyone?
jervis961
12/18/07		 Perhaps extend the warranty of the hard drive by 1 year for free? I wouldn't support a free 1 year extension on all the hardware for this.
aikiwolfie
12/18/07		 Maybe Dell should just fix the problem. They claim to be open source contributors.
johnnyk
12/18/07		 @jervis961 - "Perhaps extend the warranty of the hard drive"

Yes I agree. I would not expect Dell to extend the warranty of the entire system, but it seems reasonable to request Dell to extend the warranty for hard drive issues alone.
jmxz
12/18/07		 @aikiwolfie: "Maybe Dell should just fix the problem."
Ok - let's run with that idea.... IMHO the biggest problem is not the disk spinning down; but a whole bunch of userspace apps ranging from firefox and thunderbird writing to disks after most every click (and even while idle?) to hddtemp that makes some disks spin up when it checks their temperature, to filesystems mounted without noatime or relatime causing unnecessary writes, to postgres wanting to write checkpoints to disk every 30 seconds by default even when nothing happened.

"They claim to be open source contributors."

And indeed they are.... they contribute quite a few patches:
http://linux.dell.com/files/parted/ ...
to quite a few projects:
http://linux.dell.com/files/ ...

But I think there are philosophical differences in what is "fixed" and what is "broken" here.

IMHO, when a computer -- especially a laptop -- is totally idle for a long time, yes, the disks should be spun down and no they shouldn't be spun up again until there's something useful to do. The firmware power management settings seem to (correctly, IMHO) use a policy like this, spinning down the disks after a minute or so being idle. But then you get the thousands of (stupid, IMHO) userspace applications that decide they want to write to disks when they're idle on a regular basis for no good(IMHO) reason.

What's the fix? apt-get remove the offending packages? go track down gnome, thunderbird, postgresql, etc; and struggle with those communities to fix their broken (IMHO) software? Change power-management to not spin down the disks on idle laptops (sounds like backwards progress to me - but that's what many ubuntu defenders advocate)?
aikiwolfie
12/18/07		 Actually your right jmxz. If the problem is on the Ubuntu side then the Ubuntu team should fix it. As should other distro teams. If the problem is an application like Thunderbird or Firefox then that development team should fix it. But then again Windows regularly accesses the hard drives when the system is idle. Especially for thing like indexing. So why isn't the same thing happening to Windows systems?

But then again the reports state that Ubuntu and most other Linux distros use the default settings?

Perhaps this problem does exist in the Windows environment and has just gone unnoticed or unreported. It would be interesting to find out. I think at the very least Dell should conduct it's own test to see if it's systems are vulnerable and if it's a problem for both Windows and Linux.
jmxz
12/18/07		 aikiwolfie:

If I understand right, there are some interesting timing-dependent issues that might mean Ubuntu was just a victim of an unlucky coincidence.

Oversimplifying, consider this hypothetical setup... If the default power management firmware settings make a hard drive spin down after 59 seconds of being idle; and Ubuntu has some processes that want to write to the disk every 61 seconds; you're pretty much in the worst case you can be, where your drive will be stopping and starting every 60 seconds. If some other OS writes to the disk every 55 seconds, you'd never see the problem (since power management would never see the disk as idle and never stop the disk). If yet another OS only wrote to the disk ever 1 hour; you'd also not see a problem because spinning up and down 24 times a day is pretty much OK (your disk'll last 65 years or so).

My guess is that it's just unfortunate that some Ubuntu services decided that the "ooh let's write to the disk when we're idle" time is just slightly longer than the default time to activate the power saving mode on some common hardware (most likely the drives).
johnnyk
12/18/07		 But do you agree that Dell is at least somewhat responsible that its systems are affected, because proper testing of this and similar issues should have been conducted?
jmxz
12/18/07		 Yes - it would be nice if they found this in the "testing" that they "did" with their "partnership" with canonical.

It is rather subtle - I'm not quite sure what test should have found it, though. Perhaps higher-than-expected battery drain when the machine's supposed to be "idle"? But what reference point do they have for knowing what's expected?

But yeah - I guess somewhat responsible's fair.
jmxz
12/18/07		 @aikiwolfie : "Perhaps this problem does exist in the Windows environment and has just gone unnoticed or unreported. It would be interesting to find out."

If anyone has a dell notebook with windows they can install the S.M.A.R.T disk monitoring tools ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/smartmontools ) that found the problem on Linux -- look for the disk starting and stopping more often than a few times an hour.
jervis961
12/18/07		 Check out Direct2Dell as they just announced they now offer Ubuntu 7.10 with DVD playback. jmxz you got a shout out for an idea.
jmxz
12/18/07		 Nice! I just posted another Idea that they sell that upgrade to me.
aikiwolfie
12/18/07		 What DVD playback are they offering!? I had to install it myself. Could be worth a look :oD

Yeah I see what you're saying jmxz. Dell should have a look and see what's what and advise it's customers before it does anything to warranties.
jmxz
12/18/07		 According to the Ideas In Action link above, it's LinDVD (like IBM used in '94 and Lenovo and Toshiba seem to be using now for Linux DVD playback).
aikiwolfie
12/19/07		 Yeah I looked. I think you got the credit jmxz. Dell did something right. I'm astonished. Amazed. I might faint.
jmxz
12/19/07		 aikiwolfie: "Dell did something right.I'm astonished. Amazed. I might faint."

That was my reaction when they added Solaris support.
I'm starting to think maybe they really are listening; but it just takes them 1/2 year to get any idea through.
I'm withholding my judgment until I see how they handle difficult ones like No OS.
aikiwolfie
12/19/07		 Actually I think I need CPR from DA1. Call her back from her holidays!

LOL oh great. Half a year. So by the time the Latitude XT is out in the UK I should have convinced them that their price point is too high. Then they'll either drop it to something people can swallow or upgrade the hardware to something we'd expect.
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