Re: [smartmontools-support]Help: Load_Cycle_Count increasing steadily

[Bruce A. <ba...@gr...>]

> Starting a few days ago my raw count for Load_Cycle_Count has been 
> increasing steadily at a rate of about 2 per minute. The raw value has 
> increased as much in the last 10 days as it did in the previous 9 months.
> 
> The VALUE field reported by smartctl is decrementing every two or three 
> days (it decrements every time the raw count increases by 10000). Current 
> values are
> 
> ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME    FLAG   VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE    UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
> 193 Load_Cycle_Count  0x0012  085   085   000   Old_age Always   -          150480

Ouch.  So at the rate you are going, in another 170 to 255 days the
normalized VALUE will reach zero and your disk will have reached its 'end
of life' engineering limit on the number of head parks.

> By googling I've found that Load_Cycle_Count seems to count how often the 
> head was parked. Is this right?

I think that's right.

> Can anyone suggest what might be causing this behaviour? I've checked all 
> software that changed around 10 days ago and can't see anything that could 
> be parking the disk (I'm running fedora 3 and doing automatic regular 
> updates with yum).
> 
> Could this be a hardware issue?

Hmmm.  I don't know, but I sort of doubt it.

> Any help or guesses appreciated. If the numbers are to be believed it 
> could cause failure in a few months.

Try to determine if the disk is spinning down at the same time that the
head is parking (I doubt it).  I think hdparm -y and -C can be used to
investigate this.

You might also send an email note to the Linux Kernel Mailing
List. Perhaps someone there has an idea.

Cheers,
	Bruce