Hello, On Sat, 12 May 2012, Frank Steinmetzger wrote: >On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 12:20:57PM -0400, Norman Invasion wrote: >> On 9 May 2012 04:47, Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote: >> > Hi, >> > >> > As some know, I'm planning to buy me a LARGE hard drive to put all my >> > videos on, eventually. The prices are coming down now. I keep seeing >> > these "green" drives that are made by just about every company nowadays. >> > When comparing them to a non "green" drive, do they hold up as good? >> > Are they as dependable as a plain drive? I guess they are more >> > efficient and I get that but do they break quicker, more often or no >> > difference? >> > >> > I have noticed that they tend to spin slower and are cheaper. That much >> > I have figured out. Other than that, I can't see any other difference. >> > Data speeds seem to be about the same. >> > >> >> They have an ugly tendency to nod off at 6 second intervals. >> This runs up "193 Load_Cycle_Count" unacceptably: as many >> as a few hundred thousand in a year & a million cycles is >> getting close to the lifetime limit on most hard drives. I end >> up running some iteration of >> # hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda >> every boot. > >I bought my current internal laptop disk for Christmas 2008. It's a Samsung >HM500JI (with 500 GB). Early on I noticed that, according to smartctl, its >Load_Cycle_Count is increasing every 2 or 3 seconds. I even asked Samsung >about this, but they either couldn't give any clue or didn't want to, b/c the >Serial Number is from Turkey, so not from the European market. > >Anyhoo... I just checked the values: >Power on hours: 11500 >Start/stop count: 2797 >Power cycle count: 2197 > >But the load cycle count is at almost 12.3 million(!). That just can't be >right. I stopped believing that number a good while ago.
As I said in another mail: laptop drives are built for frequent unloading. Your number does seem a bit high though, that's about 1000 load cycles per hour... >OTOH, I just became a bit nervous when looking at smartctl's output... >Reallocated sectors: 7 (threshold 10) >Calibration retry count: 1631 >Load retry count: 1631 That's not healty. c.f. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T. HTH, -dnh -- To resist the influence of others, knowledge of one's self is most important. -- Teal'C, Stargate SG-1, 9x14 - Stronghold
