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

[Walter N. <ne...@ma...>]

I got two useful replies to this. Here is some more info that may be 
useful to others: It appears to be a Linux Kernel issue -- it happens with 
the 2.6.10 fedora kernel but not with the 2.6.9. I can fix it by adding 
"hdparm -B254" to my startup script. The man page for hdparm explains this 
parameter: "Set Advanced Power Management feature, if the drive supports 
it. A low value means aggressive power management and a high value means 
better performance. A value of 255 will disable apm on the drive."

On my Hitachi drive values around -B128 already give too agressive power 
management. -B255 disables power management to the point that it does not 
kick in when I switch to battery. -B254 is a good compromise. But I cannot 
find any documentation of what these numbers actually mean. Does anyone 
know?

--walter

On Thu, 27 Jan 2005, Walter Neumann wrote:

>
> 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
>
> By googling I've found that Load_Cycle_Count seems to count how often the 
> head was parked. Is this 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?
>
> Any help or guesses appreciated. If the numbers are to be believed it could 
> cause failure in a few months.
>
> --walter neumann