[Bug 59695] Re: High frequency of load/unload cycles on some hard disks may shorten lifetime

Paganini nebanks at gmail.com
Sat Jan 10 00:04:23 UTC 2009


For those of us with crazy drives like mine that park whenever APM times
out no matter what, I have a possible partial solution.

It seems that what is happening is that the drive's timeout for parking
the heads is shorter than the interval at which ubuntu syncs the
filesystem to disk. This means that any kind of filesystem activity
(such as regular touches or a big download) are insufficient to keep the
heads from parking.

However, smartctl talks directly to the disk itself. From experimenting
this afternoon, calling smartctl -a every 15 seconds keeps the disk
awake. This did cause the disk to heat up to 42c, which is 3 or 4
degrees hotter than it normally runs.

I wrote a script with an infinite while loop to keep calling smartctl
every 15 seconds. Unfortunately this script causes my system to hang if
it is running when I shutdown. I am pretty noob at scripting. Maybe
someone with more script-fu could contact me privately to help iron out
this problem?

-- 
High frequency of load/unload cycles on some hard disks may shorten lifetime
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/59695
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