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    Laptop Hard Drive + Load Cycle Count

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Hardware
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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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                          • D
                            dave99
                            last edited by

                            If anyone is interested, some/most of the hitachi laptop drives can have the head parking cycle disabled permanently, so they don't need to be set each boot. (You can turn it back on with the same hitachi feature tool). Kind of nice to set & forget about it.

                            Seems like some of the other brands require setting it after each power cycle.

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                            • A
                              Altercation
                              last edited by

                              FWIW: Using a drive I pulled out a Macbook Pro (Fujitsu 150GB). Checked the load count and it was ticking up at about 5-10 a minute. (may have varied over time but I immediately ran ataidle -P /dev/ad4 to put a stop to it).

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                              • T
                                tipycol
                                last edited by

                                Also found a high Load Cycle Count, new laptop drive that went straight into pfsense, a few days on 2.0 but mostly 1.2.3:

                                smartctl version 5.38 [i386-portbld-freebsd7.2] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen
                                Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
                                
                                === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
                                SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
                                Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
                                ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
                                ...
                                  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       314
                                ...
                                193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   195   195   000    Old_age   Always       -       15102
                                ...
                                

                                I've disabled APM so hopefully Load Cycle Count won't increase at the previous rate.

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