Ubuntu
acpi-support package

  1. Bug #59695
  2. Comment #215

Comment 215 for bug 59695

Revision history for this message
Lea Wiemann (lewiemann) wrote : Re: [Bug 59695] Re: High frequency of load/unload cycles on some hard disks may shorten lifetime

Hey Chris,

I doubt you are correct about that. These are my values:

> ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
> 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 072 072 000 Old_age Always - 289087

I assume VALUE is going down linearly as RAW_VALUE increases up to 1M,
since 289087 / (1 - 0.72) = 1M. Normally, RAW_VALUE increases by two
counts every minute. That means that at 12h usage per day, it will
increase by 12*60*365*2=525600 a year, placing the drive's life span at
2 years; less, if I use it more than 12h per day. Also, I'd expect that
the drive's reliability will go down quite a bit before VALUE actually
reaches 0.

If I run hdparm -B 254, Load_Cycle_Count increases almost not at all, so
I may have some hope that my drive will survive longer -- esp. since
none of the other VALUE's are as low as 72, the next lowest one being
Power_On_Hours [Old_Age] with 88.

So, for certain usage patterns (drive spinning continuously for long
hours), the load/unload cycles do seem to be problem, at least on my
laptop -- or would you disagree?

(I'm using Debian by the way, but from the other reports I've seen I
believe I'm having the same problem that some Ubuntu users have.)

-- Lea