Hard drive noises

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

Here's something I sent my family almost two years ago.  It might or
might not be relevant.

I've slightly edited it.  It deserves more but I don't have time at
the moment.

Subject: notebook hard disk stress on Ubuntu
Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2009 14:14:10 -0400 (EDT)

It seems as if there is a problem with some notebooks and Ubuntu.  A
notebook's hard drive heads can be "parked" at a furious rate causing
the drives to wear out prematurely.  Probably other Linux distros have
this problem, but that doesn't matter to you.

I don't know why there is no problem with desktop computers.

I've read about the problem in these places:
  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DanielHahler/Bug59695#Affected hardware
  https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/acpi-support/+bug/59695
  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerManagement

Look at the output of smartctl to see if this is a problem for you.

Disks these days keep statistics of various times and report them
through an interface called SMART (an acronym).  The Linux program to
deal with SMART is called smartctl.

Here's what I would like you to do.  At your convenience.

1) make sure that you have smartctl installed
	sudo smartctl --version

   If it isn't installed, Ubuntu will say so and tell you how to
   install it:
	sudo apt-get install smartmontools

2) capture the output of smartctl in a file called smartctl.LOG01:
	sudo script smartctl.LOG01
	date
	smartctl -a /dev/sda
	exit

3) look at the line starting with "193 Load_Cycle_Count".  Compare it
   with other numbers like power cycles (I don't remember the name of
   the attribute) and power on hours.

4) It would be interesting to see how things evolve.  Could you do steps
   2 and 3 again after you have used your notebook for a few hours more?
   Change all "smartctl.LOG01" to "smartctl.LOG02" so that we don't lose
   the old one.

smartctl prints out a lot of information.  Here is the most
interesting line from redact, Mom's notebook:

193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0012   092   092   000    Old_age   Always       -       83455

This says that the drive has put itself into and out of rest state
83455.  This is apparently likely to be wearing out the drive.

To put that number in perspective, the machine has been powered on 517
times and has been on for a total of 1243 hours.  So these load cycles
are happening at a rate of more than one a minute (including the vast
majority of the time when the computer is sitting there powered on but
unused).

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists