Laptop's HDD

Laptop's HDD

[Alberto Gonzalez]

Hi,

Maybe some of you have been hearing lately about a problem with laptop's hard 
disk drives being killed by *insert Linux distro here* [1]

The problem comes from a very high rate of load/unload cycles of the heads 
that reaches the 300.000-600.000 limit in 2-3 years (with smartmontools it 
can checked it with "smartctl -A /dev/sda")  . There are reports of HDD dying 
even earlier for this problem [2]

For what I've read, it's not that Linux is doing anything special to your hard 
disk, it's the BIOS settings that take care of killing your disk sooner than 
later. However, I'm asking on this list because the problem seems to have 
started with kernel 2.6.10 [3].

Windows seems to override the BIOS settings, so hardware vendors have never 
cared about this problem.

So my question is: Is this something the (Linux) kernel should care about or 
should distributions care about it with userspace tools?

By the way, this settings seem to be there in order to save power. However, 
loading/unloading the heads ~3 times per minute doesn't seem like a very good 
powersaving policy. Couldn't this be one of the reasons why Linux is using 
generally more power than Windows?

Regards,
Alberto.

[1] - http://beranger.org/index.php?page=diary&2007/10/24/18/07/21
- http://ubuntudemon.wordpress.com/2007/10/26/laptop-hardrive-killer-bug/

[2] - 
http://ubuntudemon.wordpress.com/2007/10/27/laptop-hardrive-killer-bug-is-worse-than-i-thought/#comment-31490
http://paul.luon.net/journal/hacking/BrokenHDDs.html

[3] - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2005-March/msg00463.html

Re: Laptop's HDD

[Pádraig Brady]

Alberto Gonzalez wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Maybe some of you have been hearing lately about a problem with laptop's hard 
> disk drives being killed by *insert Linux distro here* [1]

I asked about this on the fedora devel list:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-October/msg02324.html

I don't think the kernel should worry about this.
I don't even think distros should change the default settings of the BIOS/disk.

Up to and including Fedora 7 on my laptop, the disk did a load cycle
on average once every 48 seconds. Mounting the filesystems noatime changed this
to once every 108 seconds, which is a little aggressive still but not too bad.

Note fedora 8 will have the relatime option on by default for all filesystems.

Pádraig.

Re: Laptop's HDD

[Maciej W. Rozycki]

On Sun, 4 Nov 2007, Alberto Gonzalez wrote:

> The problem comes from a very high rate of load/unload cycles of the heads 
> that reaches the 300.000-600.000 limit in 2-3 years (with smartmontools it 
> can checked it with "smartctl -A /dev/sda")  . There are reports of HDD dying 
> even earlier for this problem [2]

 I use:

# hdparm -B 255 /dev/hda

to get rid of the problem with an ATA disk where I do not care that much 
about power consumption.  I do not know what the equivalent for a SATA 
disk would be, but chances are it will be easier to track it down with the 
reference above.

  Maciej

Re: Laptop's HDD

[Jeff Garzik]

Maciej W. Rozycki wrote:
> On Sun, 4 Nov 2007, Alberto Gonzalez wrote:
> 
>> The problem comes from a very high rate of load/unload cycles of the heads 
>> that reaches the 300.000-600.000 limit in 2-3 years (with smartmontools it 
>> can checked it with "smartctl -A /dev/sda")  . There are reports of HDD dying 
>> even earlier for this problem [2]
> 
>  I use:
> 
> # hdparm -B 255 /dev/hda
> 
> to get rid of the problem with an ATA disk where I do not care that much 
> about power consumption.  I do not know what the equivalent for a SATA 
> disk would be, but chances are it will be easier to track it down with the 
> reference above.

Although other power management features exist for SATA, for most hdparm 
stuff PATA and SATA are pretty much the same.  Same command set, simply 
a new bus over which to transmit the commands.  A great deal of early 
SATA is actually bridged PATA, even.

	Jeff

Re: Laptop's HDD

[Stephen Clark]

Maciej W. Rozycki wrote:

>On Sun, 4 Nov 2007, Alberto Gonzalez wrote:
>
>  
>
>>The problem comes from a very high rate of load/unload cycles of the heads 
>>that reaches the 300.000-600.000 limit in 2-3 years (with smartmontools it 
>>can checked it with "smartctl -A /dev/sda")  . There are reports of HDD dying 
>>even earlier for this problem [2]
>>    
>>
>
> I use:
>
># hdparm -B 255 /dev/hda
>
>to get rid of the problem with an ATA disk where I do not care that much 
>about power consumption.  I do not know what the equivalent for a SATA 
>disk would be, but chances are it will be easier to track it down with the 
>reference above.
>
>  Maciej
>-
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>
>  
>
My laptop harddrive is only a little over a year old and it has a cycle 
count of 193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0012   021   021   000    
Old_age   Always       -       795931

it was going up a few counts everytime I ran the smartctl -A command. It 
quit incrementing after
I did the hdparm -B 255 command.

-- 

"They that give up essential liberty to obtain temporary safety, 
deserve neither liberty nor safety."  (Ben Franklin)

"The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty 
decreases."  (Thomas Jefferson)

Re: Laptop's HDD

[Mark Lord]

Maciej W. Rozycki wrote:
> On Sun, 4 Nov 2007, Alberto Gonzalez wrote:
> 
>> The problem comes from a very high rate of load/unload cycles of the heads 
>> that reaches the 300.000-600.000 limit in 2-3 years (with smartmontools it 
>> can checked it with "smartctl -A /dev/sda")  . There are reports of HDD dying 
>> even earlier for this problem [2]
> 
>  I use:
> 
> # hdparm -B 255 /dev/hda
> 
> to get rid of the problem with an ATA disk where I do not care that much 
> about power consumption.  I do not know what the equivalent for a SATA 
> disk would be, but chances are it will be easier to track it down with the 
> reference above.
..

The exact same command works with SATA drives.

-ml