Monitor your drives to extend their life

Everything I've seen on this seems to assume Ubuntu is the only distribution for which this is an issue. I don't have a file /etc/default/acpi-support on my Fedora system. It's also not clear to me that the Load_Cycle_Count returned by smartctl is what is referred to in drive specifications as "software-controlled power on/off cycles". For my laptop, which has not been used much the former figure is over a million and the latter is only 300K, but an "extended self-test" by smartctl on the drive shows no problem. I've been told that Load/Unload cycles are not the same as power on/off cycles. But the spec sheet at

http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/manuals/ata/momentus_pm....

doesn't have an entry for Load/Unload cycles. Are we comparing apples to oranges?

Ubuntu Is All. All Else Are Irrelevant.

I've been wondering about all of this, too. I wonder if the all people that have written about this stuff really understand it? 'Cause I'm having a hard time making heads or tails out of it, so either I'm dim or it's a lot of uninformed fuss.

So there's only a problem for laptops, and it's because Ubuntu doesn't overwrite hardware default settings? Then why don't call the hardware manufacturers and ask them why they make this configurations which make their hard-drives last less than 2,5 years when some OS doesn't overwrite default configuration?

Anyway, I don't have a laptop (desktop instead) and I run Gentoo. The article tells if 'the magic number' is near 600.000 I have to worry, but after 20 months of using Gentoo and updating portage- and kerneltrees (which means writing over 100.000 files per time or so) my 'magic number' is 500. So, after all, it seems there's not much to worry about; just make sure you don't use Ubuntu on a laptop and you're safe. Or did I get the message wrong? ahem...