After seeing Stefano’s second post on hard drive life under Ubuntu, and posts from Roald Hopman on planet ubuntu, I decided to check out my laptop drive:
$ sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda|grep Load_Cycle_Count
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0×0012 013 013 000 Old_age Always - 873566
Ouch. Better keep up to date backups. People have quoted 300000 or 600000 as expected lifetime. This is a Hitatchi drive, and the laptop (Sony Vaio VGN-460) is over 2 years old. I generally keep it on AC power on my desk, and leave it running 24/7 idling on IRC for logs. (Also time to set up an IRC proxy…)
I’ll watch the stats for a day or two before trying some of the workarounds listed in Bug 59695 so I can see if they make a difference. In 30 mins, it’s only gone up by 1, so I don’t know whether it’s a current problem for me or not.
Feed - the whole site
I’m the owner of a hp nx8220 that is running Ubuntu since 2 years and sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda|grep Load_Cycle_Count give me only:
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0×0032 099 099 000 Old_age Always – 17426
And it increment of approximately 5 by day, so you should really try to fix you settings.
Beat this:
$ sudo smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sda|grep Load_Cycle_Count
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0×0032 054 054 000 Old_age Always – 4629085828642
A day later, it’s at 873775 – more than 200/day.
Yow, another day later and it’s 877375. Better try those workarounds.
I’m now doing this: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/acpi-support/+bug/59695/comments/10
Seems to be holding steady now :-)