Laptop Hard Drive + Load Cycle Count
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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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crap!
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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 - 0I will get a read out tonight to see the rate of increase….my drive was an engineering test version :p
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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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After 8 hours…
225 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0000 200 200 000 Old_age Offline - 695393
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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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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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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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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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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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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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C chris.7e referenced this topic on
