Potential hardware issue with too often HDD heads parking

Tom Donnelly tad1214 at aol.com
Wed Oct 31 10:44:18 PDT 2007


> Hi
>
> Probably does not related to FreeBSD, but anybody may confirm that
> FreeBSD laptops are not affected ?
>
> https://launchpad.net/bug59695.html
>
>   
>> When switching to battery power, /etc/acpi/power.sh issues the command
>> hdparm -B 1 to all block devices. This leads to extremely frequent
>> load cycles. For example, my new thinkpad has already done well over
>> 7000 load cycles -- in only 100 hours. That's at least one unloading
>> per minute. Googling for "load unload cycles notebook OR laptop" shows
>> that most laptop drives handle up to 600,000 such cycles. As these
>> values clearly show, this issue is of high importance and should be
>> fixed sooner rather than later.
>>
>> Please see for yourself how often your drive is load cycling:
>> smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sda
>> (This command is for an SATA drive; you'll need to install the
>> smartmontools package first.)
>>
>> See also http://paul.luon.net/journal/hacking/BrokenHDDs.html for a
>> rather dramatic account of the effects the current default values may
>> have.
>>
>> Just in case the load/unload timeout depends on the specific laptop or
>> disk model, here are my system specifications:
>> ThinkPad Z60m & Hitachi HTS541080G9SA00 disk (80GB)
>>     
>
>
>   



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