Hard drive power management in laptops

gsra99 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 06 Jan 2008 Posts: 105

Has anyone seen this thread in the Ubuntu forums about hard drive power management:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=805570

Is this a real problem? I noticed that my load cycle count on my brand new hard disk after using Gentoo for 3 months is ~80,000. Which is far to high according to the article. Does anyone know if this will reduce the lifetime of the hard drive? Apparently all laptop hard drives have a minimum load cycle count of 600,000. Generally in all linux os tend to use very aggressive power management settings for hard drives which causes the hard disk head to park every ~1 min, and this causes the load cycle count to increase rapidly. Any information would to useful. I haven't seen this problem mentioned in the forums.

d2_racing · Posted: Mon Jun 02, 2008 12:00 pm Post subject:

I will check my laptop tonight.

But for the rest, I would like to know the answer too

IvanMajhen · Guru Joined: 10 Jun 2006 Posts: 392 Location: Croatia

My Hitachi HDD, 1.5 years old:

gsra99 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 06 Jan 2008 Posts: 105

I think the load cycle count is when the hard drive 'parks' its head and not when it actually spins down the spindle. They are 2 different things, which are required for power saving on the hard drive. If this is wrong then please let me know.

Link31 · Apprentice Joined: 17 Apr 2006 Posts: 200 Location: France

It happens for me in Gentoo and Windows (actually, it happens also in Grub, so it may be BIOS-related).

I don't think it is very good for the hard drive lifetime... Fortunately, you can fix it, at least from Linux.

Just add this line to /etc/conf.d/hdparm (emerge it if needed):

gsra99 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 06 Jan 2008 Posts: 105

I'm currently using -B254 -S242 -M128 with hdparm, and I have reduced my load cycle count drastically, but I have to keep an eye on the HD temperature.

d2_racing · Posted: Mon Jun 02, 2008 8:34 pm Post subject:

IvanMajhen · Guru Joined: 10 Jun 2006 Posts: 392 Location: Croatia

So, this head parking is dangerous like when disk spins up/down?
It is better then to run some app that reads/writes to disk (like ktorrent, my count then doesn't go up) then when disk is idle? :lol:

Deactivating this could also leads to more fragile disk when using it on your lap, or against shocks.

Is there any way to read max Load_Cycle_Count number from disk firmware?

I hope they don't have any evil program in firmware to disable drive when critical count is reached, and disk could still be ok.

gsra99 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 06 Jan 2008 Posts: 105

I think the hard disk manufactures only guarantee a minimum load cycle count which is generally 600k for most hd. Therefore, once you reach this then the life span of your hd is in the hands of the gods as they say. I saw several posts on the ubuntu forums where people have said that there hd are beyond the 600k mark. I think someone even posted that there hd was on 1.2m. That is why I wanted to know how serious an issue this was. Also if you are running a read/write program constantly it does reduce the load cycle count, but to get a drastic reduction you need to use hdparm at boot. I think they recommend a -B200 -S252 for hdparm for a conservative power management setting.

d2_racing · Posted: Tue Jun 03, 2008 11:47 am Post subject:

Link31 · Apprentice Joined: 17 Apr 2006 Posts: 200 Location: France

Minthos · n00b Joined: 04 Feb 2005 Posts: 9 Location: Norway

Just got a new laptop and its HDD is already at

mrazvan · Posted: Sat Mar 28, 2009 10:42 pm Post subject:

This seems to bring about neverending discussions as more and more people (like myself) discover the issue and start asking questions, but the hdd manufacturers don't say a word.

I am using laptop_mode_tools under gentoo with little success. The problem is the HDD tries to park its heads too quick. This is a feature of notebook hdds, and on my model (a wd2500bevs) it is labeled (taken from hdparm -I)