[rhelv6-list] Heavy laptop disk cycling?

[MJang]

On Mon, 2011-01-10 at 12:40 -0500, solarflow99 wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 12:01 PM, MJang <mike at linuxexam.com> wrote:
> > On Thu, 2011-01-06 at 08:58 +0100, Jan-Frode Myklebust wrote:
> >> On Wed, Jan 05, 2011 at 08:51:17AM -0800, MJang wrote:
> >> >
> >> > Just noticed that since I installed RHEL 6 back in Nov, my laptop hard
> >> > disk (from a new T410) has gone through about 200,000 cycles, as
> >> > confirmed by the smartctl -a /dev/sda command. (If I remember right,
> >> > hard drives expire at around 600,000 cycles.)
> >>
> >> Just for datapoint.. my T400, installed with RHEL6 october 31. (was
> >> running fedora-13 before that, and RHEL5 before that), has only gone
> >> trough 290 power cycles:
> >>
> >>         9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   097   097   000    Old_age Always       -       12661
> >>
> >>        12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age Always       -       290
> >>
> >> I have disabled the "spin down hard disk" option in the power
> >> management preferences (it's an SSD, so there's nothing spinning
> >> anyway).
> >
> > Appreciate the datapoint. FWIW, I've reported this as a bug at
> > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=667485
> >
> > I gather opinions vary on whether one of the following commands is the
> > better way to prevent the premature aging problem:
> >
> > hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda
> > hdparm -B 200 /dev/sda
> >
> > I've since had to replace the hard drive, as it was spouting out lots of
> > read error messages -- the damage was focused on the top-level root
> > directory partition where RHEL 6 was installed. (the other partitions on
> > my drive were fine)
> 
> Does the new drive show high cycles also?

Nope -- it's run about 200 cycles in the past 3 days, maybe 3 cycles/hr,
which is acceptable on a laptop. (The related Ubuntu bug had a design
solution goal of 15 cycles/hr.) One thing I forgot to add here is that
it's the Load_Cycle_Count (item 193 in the output to smartctl
-a /dev/sda)

(25k cycles/yr is OK, AFAIK.) I currently have the following command in
my /etc/rc.local

/sbin/hdparm -B 200 /dev/sda

at least until I figure out or remember where hdparm settings are
normally configured.

Thanks,
Mike