Hi,
A few weeks ago I've noticed, that my half year old laptop started to
behave strange.
When left unused, after the screen gets black to save power, the disks
starts to click every few minutes, and after each click the
Load_Cycle_Count (as reported by smartctl -a /dev/sda ) increases by 1.
The laptop is equipped with Western Digital Scorpio WDC
WD7500BPKT-75PK4T0 disk, however similar problem (well, the disk is
much more silent, but Load_Cycle_Count is quickly increasing) occures
also my wife's laptop equipped with Seagate ST9500420AS.
I have found the website:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_hard_drive_clicking , which
describes the same or similar problem, but it seems, that solutions
described there do not help.
What's interesting - when I tried to run the following command (from
remote console via ssh, so that the screen remains black):
# ( LANG=C; while true ; do date ; smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep
Load_Cycle ; sleep 10 ; done ) > /tmp/rep
to find how often the head get unloaded, I have completely prevented
this effect to occur.
When I increased the delay between calls od smartctl, I stated, that
problem occures ca every 3 minutes.
I've tried to set:
hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda
and
hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda
Below are the results:
root@WZLap:~# hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda
/dev/sda: setting Advanced Power Management level to disabled
APM_level = off
root@WZLap:~# ( LANG=C; while true ; do date ; smartctl -a /dev/sda |
grep Load_Cycle ; sleep 10m ; done )
Sat Apr 14 01:07:06 CEST 2012
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 168 168 000 Old_age Always
- 97297
Sat Apr 14 01:17:07 CEST 2012
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 168 168 000 Old_age Always
- 97300
^C
root@WZLap:~# hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda
/dev/sda: setting Advanced Power Management level to 0xfe (254)
APM_level = 254
root@WZLap:~# ( LANG=C; while true ; do date ; smartctl -a /dev/sda |
grep Load_Cycle ; sleep 10m ; done )
Sat Apr 14 01:17:43 CEST 2012
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 168 168 000 Old_age Always
- 97300
Sat Apr 14 01:27:44 CEST 2012
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 168 168 000 Old_age Always
- 97303
^C
It is really allarming, as with warranted durability of 600 000
load/unload cycles, at this rate my drive will survive only ca. 3 years!
I've verified, that the set APM level remains untouched (e.g. when set
to 254, and after 20 minutes reported by "hdparm -I /dev/sda": Advanced
power management level: 254 )
The problem occurs even when the laptop is working on AC power.
Does anybody know any good solution?
Of course, I can run "smartctl -a /dev/sda >/dev/null" every 60 seconds
in the background, as it seems to prevent the problem, but it is rather
not the optimal solution ;-)
--
TIA & Regards,
Wojtek
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