Fedora May Be Killing Your Laptop's Hard Drive?

[Konstantin Svist]

Mark C. Allman wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-11-01 at 11:29 +0900, John Summerfield wrote:
>   
>> Mark C. Allman wrote:
>>     
>>> 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
>>>       
>> The pedants are in:-)
>>
>> # Thos loops for ever
>> while :
>>   do sudo smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sda | egrep '^[ \t]*193' \
>> 	| awk '{print $NF;}';
>>   sleep 1m
>>   done
>>
>> The grep and awk can be combined more elegantly too, but I'll leave that 
>> for the next pedant:-)
>>
>> And sudo could be relocated to advantage....
>>
>>
>> -- 
>>
>> Cheers
>> John
>>
>> -- spambait
>> 1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu  Z1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu
>> -- Advice
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>> http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
>> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375
>>
>> Please do not reply off-list
>>     
>
> The professor (insert big, big grin and wink here) answers:
> Didn't want it to loop forever, just a day or two.  There are 2800+
> files in /usr/bin, so 1440 minutes/day * 2 = 2880.  It works and it's
> utterly trivial.  Also, this was a "quick and dirty" loop. I'm
> interested in the numbers.  Is Fedora in fact stressing our disks?  How
> does this compare to other OSes?  Etc., etc. 
>
> -- Mark C, Allman, PMP
> -- Allman Professional Consulting, Inc.
> -- www.allmanpc.com, 617-947-4263
>
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>   

Also might help to check if you have laptop-tools package installed. It 
probably affects the HD a lot more than Fedora itself.