Many people leave their computers on around the clock. This usually implies that all the attached hard disks are always spinning. Constantly spinning up a hard disk normally increases the chances of drive failure. When a disk is not powered it should last longer than if it was spinning.

How confident are you that when you ‘delete’ a file, it really get deleted/removed/erased/wiped from your hard disk? The fact is, the ‘delete’ command does not remove your file(s). It simply tells your system to free up the space for other data. Until the space been filled with new data, your file(s) will still remain on the disk itself. That is to say, with some simple recovery tools, the files can be easily recovered. Now, if you want to completely eradicate porns files that contain sensitive information, you have to do more than just ‘delete’ and ‘empty trash’

Hard drive encryption (and to a lesser extent, secure hard drive erasing) has been in the news regarding child pornography crossing the US border, government officials around the world erasing incriminating emails and other nefarious headlines.

I’m writing this mainly for my own reference. I note that a lot of people want to install Ubuntu on a laptop but choose to put it on an external USB hard drive. The result is usually that GRUB breaks when the external drive is not connected since it cannot locate the files needed to boot which are on the external drive.

Your harddisk shouldn’t spin-down/spin-up and/or park/unpark too much causing the mechanics of the harddrive to slowly detiorate. If this is happening you should see your Load_Cycle_Count increasing too fast.

The following things might cause aggressive power management :