On 10/04/12 12:38, James Harper wrote:
On 10/04/12 12:21, Russell Coker wrote:
On Tue, 10 Apr 2012, Toby Corkindale<toby.corkindale@strategicdata.com.au> wrote:
What does the output of this look like on your drives?
smartctl -a /dev/sdb | grep Load_Cycle_Count
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 001 001 000 Old_age Always - 1284384
So if that's not lying (and SMART data is often false) then the drive would have spun down an average of about 30 times per hour during the life of the system.
Nope, it's not lying -- your drive really has spun down and up again 1.2 million times. The drives are specced as being good for 300k load cycles, so you've done well! But you're also living on borrowed time now..
Further to my previous email about Load_Cycle_Count, Wikipedia says this:
" Count of load/unload cycles into head landing zone position.[19]
The typical lifetime rating for laptop (2.5-in) hard drives is 300,000 to 600,000 load cycles.[20] Some laptop drives are programmed to unload the heads whenever there has not been any activity for about five seconds.[21] Many Linux installations write to the file system a few times a minute in the background.[22] As a result, there may be 100 or more load cycles per hour, and the load cycle rating may be exceeded in less than a year.[23] "
Maybe you are thinking of Start_Stop_Count for spindle spin up and down cycles??
Yep, I was thinking of Start_Stop_Count in terms of what it did. Sorry. Still, the WD 3.5" drives are supposedly only rated for 300k *load cycles*, so it's still a problem that the drives rack them up so amazingly quickly. It looks like someone has reversed engineered the DOS utility to disable/adjust the feature, though, so you can do it from Linux now. http://idle3-tools.sourceforge.net/ -Toby