Load_Cycle_Count around 200,000 in Inspiron 1505 I bought in June.

[Rob Landley]

Today I read http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/30/1742258

I have a Dell Inspiron 1505 which arrived brand new on June 26.  It's still 
running the Ubuntu 7.04 it came with.  I installed kubuntu-desktop but 
otherwise it's stock; I haven't even replaced the kernel (unless the update 
widget did it for me).

Four months later, according to:
  smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sda | grep "Load_Cycle_Count"

The current value on my drive is 195422, and apparently they're rated for 
600,000 cycles.  At this rate, I can expect the hard drive to fail sometime 
in late Spring.

I dug around a bit and found http://mjg59.livejournal.com/77672.html which is 
the head of Ubuntu's laptop team blaming the BIOS.  (Apparently working 
around a bios problem to avoid eating hardware would be a bad thing.)

For the moment I can make it stop incessantly parking and unparking the heads 
with "hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda", but I have to redo that every boot.  And 
adding it to the boot scripts isn't enough because the bios value gets
reset by software suspend, and then there's going into "laptop mode" by 
unplugging the AC adpater and running off of battery...

How do I fix this properly?

Rob
-- 
"One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code."
  - Ken Thompson.