Bug 59695 ("default value in power.sh potentially kills laptop disks") is about not preventing bad behaviour of drives (high Load_Cycle_Count numbers) on (laptop) harddrives.
Because the bug report has 150 comments already, I've tried to summarize it here.
There appear to be two issues here: HDD spin down and "Power cycling", whereas the first one has a relative short default (60 seconds), but the latter one gets the most complains (it's about Load_Cycle_Count).
The disk Load_Cycle_Count issue appears to be caused by a combination of two problems -- The first is overly-aggressive power management from what might be considered buggy hardware. The second is that Ubuntu appears to be touching the hard drive on a regular basis for one reason or another.
Note: In sections below relating to how to prevent damage to your hard disk, you should replace $HDD everywhere with your device, e.g. "/dev/sda" or "/dev/hda". If you have several harddrives, you need to change it accordingly and duplicate lines in workarounds.
Click for the Full Story
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DanielHahler/Bug59695