Fedora May Be Killing Your Laptop's Hard Drive?

[Mark C. Allman]

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
> 
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> 1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu  Z1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu
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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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