Fedora May Be Killing Your Laptop's Hard Drive?

[Tim]

On Wed, 2007-10-31 at 05:32 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> This is a unnecessarily attention grabbing headline. The problem has 
> been discussed in fedora-devel list in detail and Fedora weekly news 
> report has provided a summary.
> 
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue107#head-10d9e6175a2dbef23ed071339345ccc747588683

Having read through that the other day, I didn't come to the conclusion
that the issue had been concluded...

I bought a laptop just a few weeks back, was a bit disturbed about how
regularly I could hear the drive clicking over - every few seconds or so
(and I don't mean drive accesses while updatedb, etc., are doing their
scan of the drive).

I recall having to track down the drive forever doing something back
when I was using FC 3 or 4 on a desktop PC.  Then, it was CUPS doing
something every few seconds, albeit not logging what it did.  I went
around killing off services, watching the responses.  Turning off CUPS
did the trick, no amount of reconfiguring would change it's behaviour.
Thankfully some update resolved that issue.

I haven't really looked into what's doing what, yet, but the load cycle
count seems excessively high for a laptop that's only a few weeks old,
and mostly NOT running from a battery - so there's no need to keep
turning it off as often as you could.  Not to mention being immobile, so
it wasn't being shut down for being bumped about.

This is from today, which hasn't changed while I've been re-issuing the
command over the last few minutes:

[root at suspishus ~]# smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sda|grep Load_Cycle
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0012   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       16252

But the other day, while on a battery, I played with running that
command line, and watched it going up somewhere around once or twice a
minute.  The comments I read through from the referred to address (see
above URI), the other day, seemed to suggest that the drives were being
powered off probably appropriately, but were being repeatedly woken up
inappropriately.

-- 
(This computer runs FC7, my others run FC4, FC5 & FC6, in case that's
 important to the thread.)

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.
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