Comment 226 for bug 59695

to Chris Jones :

I do encourage people to use the tools specific for their harddrive to test their harddrive if the information they supply regarding their Load_Cycle_Count looks bad. (the ultimate boot cd-rom contains most of these tools)

If I would use apm 128 on my new drive the Load_Cycle_Count increases by increments of one (I have tested this before) but very fast.

193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 1335 | Wed Nov 21 13:40:02 CET 2007
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 1381 | Wed Nov 21 14:00:01 CET 2007
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 1446 | Wed Nov 21 14:20:01 CET 2007

If it would continue to rise this fast for 11 hours a day I would reach 600.000 Load_Cycles within a year.

Another example from http://ubuntudemon.wordpress.com/2007/10/28/laptop-hardrive-killer-bug-how-to-discover-whether-you-are-affected/#comment-31508

Sander's Load_Cycle_Count also seems to increment by one which means his raw value is probably correct. He has reached almost 1.9 million Load_Cycles in two years of usage. (he should have grepped for Load_Cycle_Count instead of 193 but that's besides the point)

[quote=Sander]
I have a two-year old powerbook G4, with a Seagate Momentus 5400.2 series 100GB. They also report a minimal lifetime of 600,000 cycles (http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/ds_momentus5400.pdf)

Mine is however already at 1,900,000! (more than three times as much), and still increasing rapidly. I use Ubuntu Gutsy at the moment.

I ran the following script:
while (true); do smartctl -a /dev/hda | grep 193 >> hw.txt; sleep 60; done

And the output was:
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0×0032 001 001 000 Old_age Always - 1897663
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0×0032 001 001 000 Old_age Always - 1897663
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0×0032 001 001 000 Old_age Always - 1897663
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0×0032 001 001 000 Old_age Always - 1897664
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0×0032 001 001 000 Old_age Always - 1897664
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0×0032 001 001 000 Old_age Always - 1897664
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0×0032 001 001 000 Old_age Always - 1897664
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0×000f 057 057 030 Pre-fail Always - 558423241934
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0×0032 001 001 000 Old_age Always - 1897670
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0×0032 001 001 000 Old_age Always - 1897671
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0×0032 001 001 000 Old_age Always - 1897674
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0×0032 001 001 000 Old_age Always - 1897677

So, once an error occured, and in 12 minutes it increased by 16! This does not look that good, doesn’t it?

Sander
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