{"id":54,"date":"2005-11-24T18:42:58","date_gmt":"2005-11-24T17:42:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.glandium.org\/blog\/?p=54"},"modified":"2010-01-27T08:52:44","modified_gmt":"2010-01-27T07:52:44","slug":"hard-disks-hard-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glandium.org\/blog\/?p=54","title":{"rendered":"Hard Disk’s hard life"},"content":{"rendered":"

I knew that hard disks had a limited time-life park\/unpark-wise, but I didn't know that was that bad<\/a>. I always thought that because of ext3's commit every 5 seconds, disk would never spin out and park the head. I was wrong. It seems that whether or not the disk is accessed, every put here the time it is for your disk<\/i> minutes, it does<\/b> park and unpark the head. Well, at least on laptop disks, because it seems this is not the case for desktops.<\/p>\n

My 3 year-old vaio, which is now this web server, has a Load_Cycle_Count of 580465 for 9775 Power_On_Hours, which is about 1 load cycle per minute.
\nMy 1 year-old vaio, has a Load_Cycle_Count of 83718 for 4043 Power_On_Hours, which is about 1 load cycle every 3 minutes.<\/p>\n

While I managed to actually stop the load cycles to occur on the older vaio, with hdparm -B254<\/code>, nothing actually stopped it on the newer one. I tried to change some other parameters with hdparm -S<\/code> but nothing did work. I still have to take a look at the BIOS, though.<\/p>\n

Now, the question is : why the fuck are the heads parked\/unparked every little while even when accesses occur ? Is it a conspiracy so that laptop disks won't last forever ?<\/p>\n

Well, at least, I've never<\/i> experienced a hard disk failure in 12 years of using computers with hard disks. For how long ?...<\/p>\n

[Note: the Dell laptop provided by my company, running Windows XP (which also has a somewhat journalled filesystem and commits the journal every few seconds) has around 24000 load cycles for about 800 hours of use, which is 1 load cycle every 2 minutes, so this is not a Linux issue.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I knew that hard disks had a limited time-life park\/unpark-wise, but I didn’t know that was that bad. I always thought that because of ext3’s commit every 5 seconds, disk would never spin out and park the head. I was wrong. It seems that whether or not the disk is accessed, every put here the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,5],"tags":[23],"class_list":["post-54","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc","category-pdo","tag-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glandium.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glandium.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glandium.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glandium.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glandium.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glandium.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":797,"href":"https:\/\/glandium.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54\/revisions\/797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glandium.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glandium.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glandium.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}