Hard drive noises

[Robert Brockway]

On Sun, 9 Jan 2011, Giles Orr wrote:

> When testing yesterday, I discovered that the drive had been
> power-cycled 28 times, but load-cycled 5100 times.  The Debian system
> had set itself up such that it was load-cycling the drive every 20
> seconds.  Load cycle life on most drives is in the neighbourhood of
> 600,000 and it would take a long time to get there (five to ten years
> with my use-pattern), but I suspect that behaviour accelerated the
> death of the previous drive.  I added this:
>
> /dev/sda {
>    apm = 254
> }
>
> to /etc/hdparm.conf and the problem was fixed.
>
> Ubuntu appears to have addressed the problem in Lucid.  Debian doesn't
> seem to have done anything about it (I got the most recent updates and

Hi Giles.  Are you on Lenny or Squeeze?

I wouldn't expect such a large behavioural change to occur on Lenny 
since Debian aims towards consistent behaviour in the Stable branch, even 
if that consistent behaviour is broken (in general).

It's probably already too late for Squeeze but I'd recommend filing a 
bug report.  Email the bug number and I'll comment on it too.

> still had the problem before applying a fix myself), and that my OS
> endangers my hardware (even in what they refer to as "a very small
> number of cases") disgusts me.

It may simply be an oversight, albeit a bad one.  Or they may have found 
enough problems with tweaking SMART settings that it made sense to avoid 
having it as the default.  Over the years Linux has had a number of 
apparently suboptimal defaults that were there because the optimum 
strategy was found to hard lock 1% of boxes on install.  The argument is 
that the installer should maximise chances of a successful install.

Cheers,

Rob

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