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    Laptop Hard Drive + Load Cycle Count

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Hardware
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    • M
      mrbostn
      last edited by

      I get this error when trying to download adaidle

      pkg_add -r adaidle

      Error: FTP Unable to get ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-7.2-release/Latest/adaidle.tbz: File unavailable (e.g., file not found, no access)
      pkg_add: unable to fetch 'ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-7.2-release/Latest/adaidle.tbz' by URL

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      • jimpJ
        jimp Rebel Alliance Developer Netgate
        last edited by

        Try this instead:

        pkg_add -r ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-7-stable/Latest/ataidle.tbz
        

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        • M
          mrbostn
          last edited by

          I get this.

          Error: FTP Unable to get ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-7-stable/Latest/adaidle.tbz: File unavailable (e.g., file not found, no access)
          pkg_add: unable to fetch 'ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-7-stable/Latest/adaidle.tbz' by URL

          By the way, In about 2 hours I will be at the production box. What should the numbers look like when I run smartctl?

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          • K
            kpa
            last edited by

            The tool is called ataidle instead of adaidle :)

            Here is mine on a laptop hd that is probably more than 6 years old:

            
            # smartctl -A /dev/ad0 | grep Load_Cycle
            193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   001   001   000    Old_age   Always       -       483217
            #
            
            

            After turning off powermanagement with -P ataidle reports:

            
            # ataidle /dev/ad0
            Model:                  ST960821A
            Serial:                 3LF0G30K
            Firmware Rev:           3.00
            ATA revision:           ATA-6
            LBA 48:                 no
            Geometry:               16383 cyls, 16 heads, 63 spt
            Capacity:               55GB
            SMART Supported:        yes
            SMART Enabled:          yes
            APM Supported:          yes
            APM Enabled:            no
            AAM Supported:          no
            AAM Enabled:            no
            #
            
            

            Load_Cycle_Count stopped increasing after turning off APM.

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            • D
              danswartz
              last edited by

              Hmm, mine was only 1847.

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              • jimpJ
                jimp Rebel Alliance Developer Netgate
                last edited by

                @kpa:

                The tool is called ataidle instead of adaidle :)

                Nice catch on the typo. :-)
                (I fixed them)

                @kpa:

                Here is mine on a laptop hd that is probably more than 6 years old:

                
                # smartctl -A /dev/ad0 | grep Load_Cycle
                193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   001   001   000    Old_age   Always       -       483217
                #
                
                

                Load_Cycle_Count stopped increasing after turning off APM.

                That is rather high. Good to know that it stopped just like mine did. Did you happen to notice how fast it was increasing?

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                • jimpJ
                  jimp Rebel Alliance Developer Netgate
                  last edited by

                  @mrbostn:

                  By the way, In about 2 hours I will be at the production box. What should the numbers look like when I run smartctl?

                  It depends on the drive and system, really. Some Seagates spit out nonsense numbers for certain values and can't be trusted (like error rates, iirc) but are accurate for others.

                  If it's a new drive, most of the values should be 0 or near 0. Errors should be 0, reallocations should be 0. The Power_On_Hours will of course increase over time. There are a couple counts that will go up every time you reboot or power cycle.

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                  • K
                    kpa
                    last edited by

                    @jimp:

                    @kpa:

                    The tool is called ataidle instead of adaidle :)

                    Nice catch on the typo. :-)
                    (I fixed them)

                    @kpa:

                    Here is mine on a laptop hd that is probably more than 6 years old:

                    
                    # smartctl -A /dev/ad0 | grep Load_Cycle
                    193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   001   001   000    Old_age   Always       -       483217
                    #
                    
                    

                    Load_Cycle_Count stopped increasing after turning off APM.

                    That is rather high. Good to know that it stopped just like mine did. Did you happen to notice how fast it was increasing?

                    The drive is very old and was in constant use on a laptop before I "rescued" it for my pfSense box so I have no idea what the number was when I started using it on my system. I forgot to check what the APM setting was before setting APM to zero but after setting it to 2 Load_Cycle_Count increased to 483228 in just a few minutes.

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                    • jimpJ
                      jimp Rebel Alliance Developer Netgate
                      last edited by

                      Sounds about like what I had expected.

                      I'm working on getting smartmontools and ataidle into 2.0. Someone had already written a gui for smartmontools, but I'll need to whip something up for ataidle.

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                      • M
                        mrbostn
                        last edited by

                        Here's my production box readout.

                        It's been up for a few weeks or so. The load cycle count seems low about look at the raw_read_error_rate. That seems high.

                        Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
                        ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG    VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_                                                                              FAILED RAW_VALUE
                          1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate    0x000f  100  100  046    Pre-fail  Always      -                                                                                    68771
                          2 Throughput_Performance  0x0005  100  100  030    Pre-fail  Offline      -                                                                                    12255232
                          3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0003  100  100  025    Pre-fail  Always      -                                                                                    1
                          4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032  100  100  000    Old_age  Always      -                                                                                    37
                          5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct  0x0033  100  100  024    Pre-fail  Always      -                                                                                    8589934592000
                          7 Seek_Error_Rate        0x000f  100  100  047    Pre-fail  Always      -                                                                                    520
                          8 Seek_Time_Performance  0x0005  100  100  019    Pre-fail  Offline      -                                                                                    0
                          9 Power_On_Seconds        0x0032  099  099  000    Old_age  Always      -                                                                                    679h+26m+26s
                        10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0013  100  100  020    Pre-fail  Always      -                                                                                    0
                        12 Power_Cycle_Count      0x0032  100  100  000    Old_age  Always      -                                                                                    37
                        192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032  100  100  000    Old_age  Always      -                                                                                    26
                        193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032  100  100  000    Old_age  Always      -                                                                                    96
                        194 Temperature_Celsius    0x0022  100  100  000    Old_age  Always      -                                                                                    42 (Lifetime Min/Max 25/45)
                        195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered  0x001a  100  100  000    Old_age  Always      -                                                                                    32
                        196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032  100  100  000    Old_age  Always      -                                                                                    459931648
                        197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0012  100  100  000    Old_age  Always      -                                                                                    0
                        198 Offline_Uncorrectable  0x0010  100  100  000    Old_age  Offline      -                                                                                    0
                        199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x003e  200  200  000    Old_age  Always      -                                                                                    0
                        200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate  0x000f  100  100  060    Pre-fail  Always      -                                                                                    384
                        203 Run_Out_Cancel          0x0002  100  100  000    Old_age  Always      -                                                                                    1529023102969
                        240 Head_Flying_Hours      0x003e  200  200  000    Old_age  Always

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                        • jimpJ
                          jimp Rebel Alliance Developer Netgate
                          last edited by

                          Looking at that, I'd guess it's a Seagate drive, and the numbers are bogus for those values.

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                          • M
                            mrbostn
                            last edited by

                            @jimp:

                            Looking at that, I'd guess it's a Seagate drive, and the numbers are bogus for those values.

                            It's a Fujitsu

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                            • jimpJ
                              jimp Rebel Alliance Developer Netgate
                              last edited by

                              I haven't seen many of those. They may also throw out bogus numbers, but if they are real, they're worrisome :-)

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                              • M
                                mrbostn
                                last edited by

                                crap!

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                                • G
                                  GoldServe
                                  last edited by

                                  Intel Gen1 SSD:

                                  /usr/local/sbin/smartctl -A /dev/ad4

                                  smartctl 5.39.1 2010-01-28 r3054 [FreeBSD 8.1-RC1 i386] (local build)
                                  Copyright (C) 2002-10 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net

                                  === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
                                  SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 5
                                  Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
                                  ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG    VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
                                    3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0000  100  000  000    Old_age  Offline      -      0
                                    4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0000  100  000  000    Old_age  Offline      -      0
                                    5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct  0x0002  001  001  000    Old_age  Always      -      0
                                    9 Power_On_Hours          0x0002  100  100  000    Old_age  Always      -      987
                                  12 Power_Cycle_Count      0x0002  100  100  000    Old_age  Always      -      63
                                  192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0002  100  100  000    Old_age  Always      -      16
                                  232 Available_Reservd_Space 0x0003  099  099  010    Pre-fail  Always      -      0
                                  233 Media_Wearout_Indicator 0x0002  099  099  000    Old_age  Always      -      0
                                  225 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0000  200  200  000    Old_age  Offline      -      695352
                                  226 Load-in_Time            0x0002  255  000  000    Old_age  Always      -      0
                                  227 Torq-amp_Count          0x0002  000  000  000    Old_age  Always      -      0
                                  228 Power-off_Retract_Count 0x0002  000  000  000    Old_age  Always      -      0

                                  I will get a read out tonight to see the rate of increase….my drive was an engineering test version :p

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                                  • jimpJ
                                    jimp Rebel Alliance Developer Netgate
                                    last edited by

                                    I'm not sure the Load Cycle Count would hurt an SSD that much since it seems to be the heads cycling on a traditional HDD that are the reason that this tends to hurt over time. Still would be interesting to see if it's going up on those too. :-)

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                                    • G
                                      GoldServe
                                      last edited by

                                      After 8 hours…

                                      225 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0000  200  200  000    Old_age  Offline      -      695393

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                                      • X
                                        Xfinity
                                        last edited by

                                        @jimp:

                                        I'll speed up my plans to make packages for smartmontools and ataidle.

                                        Would be great ;). I am working to get the packages installed as we speak but haven't succeeded yet. But that is my fault as I am a beginner with pfsense (did I mention that I love pfsense, great work!!! :D)

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                                        • P
                                          Porklaser
                                          last edited by

                                          I haven't seen this problem specifically in PFsense, as I've never run it from a laptop hard drive.
                                          I've encountered this and similar issues in a lot of systems that use small hard drives intended for portable devices. For whatever reason, the default mode for some of these disks seems to be "Park as soon as I can, over and over until I die" unless told otherwise. It's a distinctive "clack" noise too and you'll hear it over and over again while the system is running.

                                          I've even encountered in in windows (Where it is a /real/ pain to deal with because you don't have all these great tools available)

                                          Some hard drive manufactures will have a tool to change settings in the drive's firmware(or nvram, whatever) to lengthen the idle-park time. Sometimes these tools are unsupported. They almost always require boot from a dos floppy. :p

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                                          • jimpJ
                                            jimp Rebel Alliance Developer Netgate
                                            last edited by

                                            Yep, it's not specific to FreeBSD at all. There was an uproar a while back about Ubuntu having the same problem, too, with Load Cycles.

                                            Thankfully FreeBSD and Linux have the utilities to adjust the drives and you're not stuck booting to DOS :-)

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