After I added "apm_battery = 255" to hdparm.conf per Colin's request,
and rebooted my system, logged in then left it alone for 10 minutes, the
HD's start/stop count DOESN'T INCREASE ANYMORE.

So this is effectively a "quick & dirty fix".

hdparm -I confirms : « Advanced power management level: disabled »

However disabling it completely doesn't sound like the best solution, it
might be better to leave *some* HD power management active, but with
values that doesn't allow the disk to spin down every so often !

"man hdparm" suggests that -B values >= 128 do not allow spindown, while
-S values allow setting the desired timeout precisely.

So aggressive values that allow a disk to spin down after a couple of
seconds should never be a default ! And upgrading from Oneiric to
precise made this happen... :-/

Checking /lib/hdparm/hdparm-functions shows that battery -B default is
127 (spindown allowed).

That is not necessarily wrong, but should probably be followed by
something by -S36 (that makes spindown after 3 minutes of inactivity) or
no less than -S24 (would be 2 minutes), while I see no default value for
-S ?!

A typical Linux machine usually accesses disks at least once a minute
(unless laptop-mode tools are in use and syslogs are delayed, etc...) so
spinning a disk down in a shorter amount of time really risks causing an
undesired and disk-killing behaviour...

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/952556

Title:
  [Precise] [Hardware-killer] HD restarts every few seconds

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