[Bug 1645294] Re: Laptop SSD shows write errors after 10 minutes idle on battery

[Garbalo]

** Package changed: ubuntu => hdparm (Ubuntu)

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Title:
  Laptop SSD shows write errors after 10 minutes idle on battery

Status in hdparm package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  When Ubuntu puts my SSD to sleep, write errors occur reproducably,
  and the file system consequently goes to read-only. This happens
  after about 10 minutes of disk inactivity.

  Software and hardware details:
  - Lubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus)
  - Dell Latitude E6530
  - ADATA SSD SX900 512GB (5.0.2c)

  I have no written down logs of a crash, because the disk is
  read-only before output occurs. In a few cases, I could see error
  messages in a console window. They said that some write functions to
  disk rendered an error. Further messages then said that the disk was
  set to read-only (which is the reaction to write errors I prefer).

  The problem did not manifest itself when I set up a script to write
  the system state to disk regularly ("Heisenbug").

  I worked around the problem by adding the following to
  /etc/hdparm.conf and rebooting:

  /dev/sda {
  	# -B apm setting
  	apm = 254
  	# -B apm setting when on battery
  	apm_battery = 254
  	# -S standby (spindown) timeout for the drive
  	spindown_time = 0
  }

  In this, "apm = 254" should be the default anyway. The default value
  for apm_battery is 128, though. I could not determine the default
  value for spindown_time, because I did not find a command to read
  this value. However, setting it to 0 was my last step to fixing the
  problem.

  It appears that spinning down my SSD for power-saving does not work.
  I cannot determine whether this is a kernel bug or a firmware
  problem. In any case, spinning down a SSD does not appear to be of
  much advantage to me. Therefore, it might be better to set the
  defaults for SSDs as in my workaround above.

  Another problem is that the options of hdparm and in particular
  their meaning could be explained better in the man pages.

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