[ubuntu-uk] Load Unload Cycles

[Tom Bamford]

I've been looking at this bug as well and peeked at my drive stats. The
mentioned Load_Cycle_Count stands at 355,884 on my laptop after I
observed it increase by over 150 counts in just a few minutes on battery
power.

Can anyone confirm if there is a correlation between this count and the
lifespan of a hard drive? I'm a little bit concerned my drive may be
approaching retirement earlier than I'd hoped, especially as my current
one is a replacement for an identical Samsung model that lasted only a
few months from new, also running Ubuntu.

Tom


On Wed, 2007-10-31 at 14:48 +0000, Dougie Richardson wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> While investigating the interesting arguments concerning bug #59695, I
> noted that a lot of the argument centres around the assumption that
> Windows bypasses BIOS settings and configures drive access with so
> called "sane" values.
> 
> Well I thought I'd check this out and although I'm still in doubt as to
> the validity of whether increased time spent in the hard disk landing
> zone is significant in reducing lifespan - I can confirm one myth as
> debunked: Windows Vista does not alter the load unload cycle parameters.
> 
> I've put up a quick piece on my blog (http://blog.lynxworks.eu/) but
> suffice to say that after disabling in Ubuntu, after 15 minutes there is
> no increase in load unload cycles. Reboot into Windows and after 15
> minutes reboot to Ubuntu and surprisingly the cycles have increased by
> ten.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Dougie Richardson
> 
>