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Linux Hard Disk Issue - Excessive Load_Cycle_Count

Prologue: My 2 year old laptop's harddisk had died a few weeks ago, and I replaced it with a Seagate Momentus 5400.3 160GB SATA Drive. I have been running only Linux for a long time on my laptop. (Running Ubuntu Intrepid at present) While trying to ascertain the cause of this premature death, I came to notice the abnormally high Load_Cycle_Count. This can be checked using smartmontools by issuing the command sudo smartctl -n standby -a /dev/sda where /dev/sda has to be replaced with the appropriate disk name. The option -n ensures that if the disk is already in standby, smartctl doesn't wake it up. A little bit of Googling returned quite a lot of stuffs about this issue. Laptop Harddisks, in order to improve power efficiency while on battery, have quite aggressive power management features by default. Now this is not really bad. When the disk is not accessed for sometime it spins down itself. So far so good, the disk stops spinning unnecessarily thereby cutting down power con

Evolution Of A Linux User

A message taken from Kulua mailing list. From - Tue Dec 14 13:22:38 1999 Received: from kuhub.cc.ku.edu by lark.cc.ku.edu (8.8.7/1.1.8.2/12Jan95-0207PM) id PAA0000031643; Mon, 13 Dec 1999 15:07:29 -0600 (CST) Received: from DIRECTORY-DAEMON by KUHUB.CC.KU.EDU (PMDF V5.2-32 #39821) id <01JJGH1JNK6800TMXQ@KUHUB.CC.KU.EDU>; Mon, 13 Dec 1999 15:07:27 CST (UTC -06:00) Received: from violet.jayhawks.net ("port 1826"@violet.jayhawks.net [24.124.24.226]) by KUHUB.CC.KU.EDU (PMDF V5.2-32 #39821) with ESMTP id <01JJGH1G9GT400TIKN@KUHUB.CC.KU.EDU>; Mon, 13 Dec 1999 15:07:23 -0600 (UTC -06:00) Received: (from listserv@localhost) by violet.jayhawks.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) id PAA19912; Mon, 13 Dec 1999 15:06:33 -0600 Resent-date: Mon, 13 Dec 1999 15:06:33 -0600 Date: Mon, 13 Dec 1999 15:06:20 -0600 (CST) Resent-from: kulua-l@kulua.org From: Jeffrey Watts Subject: Evolution Of A Linux User [LONG] Resent-sender: kulua-l-request@kulua.org To: KULUA List Reply-to: kulua-l@kulua.org R