On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 10:09 PM, Roman Kyrylych <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all! > > I wanted to bring this long time ago when I discovered the problem > with my old Seagate Momentus 5400.3, but then forgot > since my new WD Scorpio Blue is less affected by this. > > But recently I noticed a couple of reports about the issue on forums and IRC, > so I'm bringing this here. > > The problem is that on some HDDs (and/or with some BIOSes?) > HDD head parking is done too often. > This can be seen with Load_Cycle_Count in smartctl output > being increased quickly (more than once per minute), > and heard as relatively frequent clicks during low IO load. > More at > http://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Known_issues#Drives_which_perform_frequent_head_unloads_under_Linux > > Basically, if Load_Cycle_Count divided by Power_On_Hours is more than 30-60 > and your HDD is powered for many hours every day > - your HDD may reach the limit in a couple of years. > > More info specifically about WD Green HDDs: > http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/linux-kernel/2008/4/10/1396844/thread > https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/kernel-bugs/2008-April/035194.html > (you can find wdidle3 with google, it's not accessible from WD site). > > I want to stress that this is _not_specific to WD Green drives. > > The problem is easy to fix, but that's if you _know_ about it. > I think most of users are not aware of it. > > Now to the point of this message and why it is on this mailing list. > What is the best way to handle this? > > There is a nice script which automatically tunes HDD options > to fix this depending on HDD and/or laptop model. > http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/tj/storage-fixup.git > > Would it be okay if we package it and put it in core & install CD? > Would it be enough to put this information in Official Install Guide? > Would it be better to not care that much about this, > and only mention it in some wiki page plus link in (Post-)Install Guide? > > I am really not sure what is the best way here. > I'd like to hear your feedback on this. >
+1 for spreading more the noise about this. This was the opinion I expressed in this old thread : http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=39258
