Hard drive – Excessive load cycling?
While using Ubuntu I have heard an occasional clicking / ticking sound from the hard drive which does not sound normal. You don’t get the same sound when running XP, for example. I’m aware that the Acer Aspire One suffers from what is known as the “death click”. I’m not sure if the NC10 suffers from the same thing. I have installed smartmontools and it suggests that the drive is fine, but the instructions on http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=805570 are very difficult to follow – there seems to be lots of confounded issues. Does anybody know more about this?
November 14, 2008 at 5:48 pm
Am I just being paranoid about this? We will all know in 6 months time when our hard drives fail I guess!
December 1, 2008 at 5:43 am
My load_cycle count was growing pretty fast, around 110/hr.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerManagement
For ubuntu 8.10 I only had to do the following to prevent the load_cycles increasing while on ac:
set “ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE=true” in /etc/default/acpi-support
This sets HD spindown for 1 min on battery power and 2 hrs on ac power.
These settings are configured in /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf
After this change I still need to test the load_cycle increase rate while on battery power
December 30, 2008 at 6:01 pm
Just to elaborate, the Fix ‘ils’ mentions works on Intrepid/Ubuntu 8.10, through changing:
ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE=false (default) to
ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE=true
to /etc/default/acpi-support.
The ugly workarounds are for previous versions. Might be worth downloading updates on previous versions, rebooting and trying the above rebooting again then run
smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep Load_Cycle_Count ; sleep 3600 ; smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep Load_Cycle_Count
to check current Load Cycle Count then again exactly an hr later. Run in multiples of 3600 (seconds in an hr) then take an average for greater accuracy if desired.
January 10, 2009 at 10:58 pm
I have a black NC10 with a Hitachi Drive. For me only
hdparm -B254 /dev/sda
did the trick. Of course I changed this setting inside the laptop-mode configfile, but the default configuration of Laptop-Mode made my Load Cycles still go up. But now the Powermanagement seems to be disabled completely. Has somebody found a better solution?
June 14, 2009 at 4:48 pm
found on ubuntu-fr documentation a solution that seems to work nicely to this problem:
cmd=’hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda’;sudo $cmd && echo -e ‘#!/bin/sh\n’”$cmd” > /tmp/hdfix && sudo install /tmp/hdfix /etc/pm/power.d/00-hdparm.sh && sudo install /tmp/hdfix /etc/pm/sleep.d/00-hdparm.sh
for me wasn’t working with sudo so made a sudo su then run the command again without any sudo in it and does the trick.
Hope this will help
regards,
nathan