Re: frequent disk head unloads under Linux: additional hardware

[Pascal Vandeputte <pascal@asmodeus.be>]

Tejun Heo wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Pascal Vandeputte wrote:
>   
>> Hi,
>>
>> I've been highly frustrated for more than a year about this problem with
>> my HP nx7400 laptop and its Seagate Momentus 5400.2 disk (which is
>> otherwise a really fine piece of equipment). By switching from Ubuntu to
>> openSUSE today, I had to look for the Suse way of fixing this up
>> (instead of editing /etc/hdparm.conf on Ubuntu), and I stumbled upon the
>> storage-fixup script which is really nice!
>>
>> As my harddisk isn't included in by default yet, I've attached the
>> required information to this e-mail.
>>
>> Adding this to /etc/storage-fixup.conf solves it:
>>
>>    # Reported drive model: ST9100824AS
>>    rule hp-nx7400
>>    dmi system-manufacturer Hewlett-Packard
>>    dmi system-product-name HP Compaq nx7400*
>>    ata model ST9*AS
>>    act hdparm -B 255 $DEV
>>     
>
> How much does the Load_Cycle_Count increase under idle usage per hour
> without the adjustment?
>   
About thrice per minute:

# while : ; do smartctl --all /dev/sda | grep ^193; sleep 60; done
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   037   037   000    Old_age  
Always       -       126856
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   037   037   000    Old_age  
Always       -       126859
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   037   037   000    Old_age  
Always       -       126862
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   037   037   000    Old_age  
Always       -       126865
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   037   037   000    Old_age  
Always       -       126867
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   037   037   000    Old_age  
Always       -       126869

I reached the first 120000 cycles within 10 months of moderate usage
(it's my personal laptop, not used for my day job).

It occurs in Windows XP as well, but not as frequently.

>> An unfortunate side-effect of meddling with the power saving on my
>> system occurs at shutdown: for some reason I can clearly hear the drive
>> spin down and then suddenly spin up and initialize again before the
>> power is killed... This doesn't happen if I leave everything at default
>> settings. Restoring the default setting (128) manually before shutting
>> down doesn't prevent this either. It's weird and I've been working
>> around it by rebooting and using the power button when I see GRUB appear.
>>     
>
> That's a known problem of certain HP laptops.  Please take a look at the
> following bug report.
>
>   http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8855
>
> Thanks.
>   
Thanks for the pointer, I have already submitted my own data in that
topic in the mean time. I hope that someday I can install the latest
distro without worrying about hdparm tweaks :-)

Greetings,

Pascal