Gilles,
I think the root of the both evils is common :)

On a desktop computer, spinning down  and then spinning up the hard disk 
produced the same annoying "clank". If I had a newer and quieter hard drive on 
that machine
I could have missed this problem ... (or at least realize it only later by the 
spinup delay).Because the noise I found it just about an hour after installing 
the new release on this machine :)
I myself solved the problem by setting hdparm.conf and disabling apmd and acpid 
(unneeded on that machine). So I'm not affected by this problem any more myself.

Now, we must make the difference between the following parameters :
1.Start/Stop Count  and
2.Load/Unload Cycle Count

The first counts how many times the hard drive entered  sleep mode OR was fully 
stopped/powered off. 
The second one counts the number of times the heads were parked in the landing 
area. You can get the heads to go to the landing area and keep the platters 
spinning, but you cannot 
spin down without parking the heads. So, wherever you spin down the drive both 
of those smart parameters are incremented. When the drive is just parked, only 
Load/Unload Cycle Count is incremented. 
While a lot of parking is not bad, a lot of start/stops are bad. 
The <<hdparm -S >> in the power management scripts   that I'm pointing my 
finger at controlls the spinup/spindown and not just the parking of the heads. 
And the default timeout for that is not only uninspired, but potentially 
dangerous. This is what actually has the greatest potential to kill the drive 
prematurely. So, in your smartctl output look for a high start/stop count , not 
for a high load/unload count .
These are the values for my laptop that still runs Dapper :

  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0012   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       
-       749   
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       
-       386
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0012   036   036   000    Old_age   Always       
-       646281

The hard drive is only about 1 year old. I'm not worried about
Load_Cycle_Count (which is way over 600k ). I would worry about a high
Start_Stop_Count .

-- 
default value in power.sh potentially kills laptop disks
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/59695
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