Fedora May Be Killing Your Laptop's Hard Drive?

[Mark C. Allman]

On Wed, 2007-10-31 at 17:10 +0000, Alan Cox wrote:
> > I have.  But what you have is an abstract range of numbers which apply
> > some sort of power management, but without any definition of what those
> > numbers mean, other than more or less power management.  You don't get
> > something like - if the drive has been idle for five minutes, or X
> > seconds, you can get the drive to park the head.
> 
> Some drives have that, some don't. Most also honour the specific timeout
> setting via hdparm -S. (-S 0 being don't stop)
> 
> Alan
> 
This is a very interesting thread, so I thought I'd take a look and see
what my system says and does.

System: Dell XPS M1710 laptop, about a year old, 80GB HD, running Linux
2.6.22.9-91.fc7

I set up a loop to print the last value of the "193 Load_Cycle_Count"
line from command "smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sda" once a minute this
morning.  I let it run all day, and after eight hours it never changed
from 328146.  I shutdown (hibernated) the system and resumed a bit later
in my home office.  The loop (which just resumed right along with
everything else) now prints a constant value of 328150 once a minute.

FWIW, the loop looks like:

  for whoCares in /usr/bin/*; do   # easy way to loop for a few days
    sudo smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sda | egrep '^[ \t]*193' | awk '{print
$NF;}'; 
    sleep 60; 
  done

Also, my XPS has an option in the Bios to set the disk to run quieter
with slower access, or with faster access but a bit noisier.  I might
change it from what I have it set to now and run my all-day test.

-- Mark C, Allman, PMP
-- Allman Professional Consulting, Inc.
-- www.allmanpc.com, 617-947-4263

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