Notebook Hard Drive Load Cycles

hirakendu · Guru Joined: 24 Jan 2007 Posts: 386 Location: san diego

After reading a much hyped article about frequent hard drive head parking (anything about ubuntu is dugg

) :

mirekm · Posted: Fri Oct 26, 2007 1:53 pm Post subject:

In is not max load cycles for your hard drive. The value is avarege count of load cycles before drive failure, and it is made on some way like that, that they take for example 1000 disks for testing, and perform on them let say 10 000 load cycles (on each), and as result of that they get about 17 failures.
As average they receive 600 000 load cycles. So don't worry.

hirakendu · Guru Joined: 24 Jan 2007 Posts: 386 Location: san diego

Thanks for reassuring me

. Although I am almost sure that the number 600,000 is not `at most', and hopefully just 'average'. Would have been happiest if I was told it is 'at least' 600000, never mind void warranties

. Banking on engineering redundancies

. Either way, I have come down to 128 as the best compromise. Drive is running slightly warm (much cooler than 254), and on the better, not too much 'clicky' too. One thing I must add is that the program powersaved is very aggressive at that, so I might suggest to use it with caution, or as I did, make laptop_mode take control of hard drive apm.
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albright · Posted: Fri Oct 26, 2007 10:27 pm Post subject:

the default laptop_mode spindown while on battery
is 5 seconds (which seems a little "aggressive" to
me). But you can set it to be whatever you want ...

see /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf
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hirakendu · Guru Joined: 24 Jan 2007 Posts: 386 Location: san diego

Its not the spin up/down of the platters which concerns me, but rather the head parking part which is the issue here. Yes, the spin-up/down of laptop_mode is indeed aggressive. In fact I have disabled the control of spin/up down using laptop_mode. (We can increase the idle time outs in laptop_mode though.)
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step · Apprentice Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 198

Model Family: Hitachi Travelstar 80GN family

hirakendu · Guru Joined: 24 Jan 2007 Posts: 386 Location: san diego

That makes me feel confident

. Btw, I am hopefully assuming that your hard-drive / notebook is not of any special make and just an average one like mine. (I just googled up, but couldn't find that specification for your hard drive, but looks that its designed for 300,000/600,000. However, it seems that they have been tested fine for long term endurance tests of 1,000,000. Great

.) (Btw, I also saw that supported life is 20,000 hrs

. I am at 7827, compared to your 15,000.)

But here is something I want to know. In general, is the notebook hard drive life, for whatever reasons, typically about 2 years or so ?
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