[Bug 59695] Re: High frequency of load/unload cycles on some hard disks may shorten lifetime

[Alexey Borzenkov]

Hanno, I don't really remember, but I think back when I was
investigating problems with my Samsung drive I found that iotop didn't
show all the interesting values and was patching it to be more precise.
Also, please be aware, that querying smart will always unpark drive
heads, because smart values (I think) have to be read from special
sectors on your drive. The same goes for ANY hard drive temperature
monitoring (because they ALL have to query smart to get drive
temperature), so remove hddtemp if you have it installed.

If you want your drive to stay parked longer try enabling laptop-mode
(look at /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf for details and don't forget
to set ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE=true in /etc/default/acpi-support). What you
must be interested in is *_MAX_LOST_WORK_SECONDS, but it will work on AC
only when you have ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE_ON_AC=1. You might, just like me,
find it a lot better for your drive to stay spinned down than to have it
constantly working with disabled APM.

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High frequency of load/unload cycles on some hard disks may shorten lifetime
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/59695
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