Re: Dangerously high Load_Cycle_Count on my Thinkpad T61 Hitachi drive

[Celejar <celejar@gmail.com>]

On Sun, 2 Jun 2013 17:36:47 +0200
Vincent Lefevre <vincent@vinc17.net> wrote:

> On 2013-06-02 11:04:07 -0400, Celejar wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > Prompted by another thread on this list, I decided to check my drive's
> > Load_Cycle_Count, and it seems that my drive is living on borrowed time:
> > 
> > 193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0012   031   031   000    Old_age   Always       -       697557
> > 
> > Searching the web indicates that a laptop drive is rated at most for
> > about 600,000 cycles, so ...
> 
> On my current laptop I have:
> 
> 193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   001   001   000    Old_age   Always       -       2115831
> 
> This is much higher! I haven't noticed any sign of failure yet.
> 
> On another laptop, I had:
> 
> 193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0012   001   001   000    Old_age   Always       -       3759880
> 
> before a fatal failure.
> 
> Perhaps you can ignore what you have found on the web.

Thanks. Perhaps, but some of what I read was by Henrique, who seems to
be a hardware / disk / Thinkpad expert, as well as a DD, so I take his
stuff pretty seriously.

http://linux-thinkpad.10952.n7.nabble.com/T420s-HD-life-and-Load-Cycle-counter-td5617.html

> > 2) What should I do to attempt to preserve whatever life it has left?
> > hdparm -B 254/255? Anything else?
> 
> On my current laptop, I had to set
> 
> # VL: apm_battery was 127 by default, but the -S option (spindown_time)
> # doesn't seem to work, and since the drive is used very often, let's
> # forbid spin-down by setting apm_battery to 128 (any value between 128
> # and 254 should be OK). See:
> #   http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=684241
> #   http://askubuntu.com/questions/137544/how-to-change-harddrive-spindown-time
> apm_battery = 128
> 
> in /etc/hdparm.conf several months ago. Since then, bug 684241 has
> been fixed, so that this may no longer be necessary.

Thanks again.

Celejar