On 10 May 2012 14:01, Mark Knecht <markkne...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 9:20 AM, Norman Invasion > <invasivenor...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On 9 May 2012 04:47, Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> Hi, >>> >>> As some know, I'm planning to buy me a LARGE hard drive to put all my >>> videos on, eventually. The prices are coming down now. I keep seeing >>> these "green" drives that are made by just about every company nowadays. >>> When comparing them to a non "green" drive, do they hold up as good? >>> Are they as dependable as a plain drive? I guess they are more >>> efficient and I get that but do they break quicker, more often or no >>> difference? >>> >>> I have noticed that they tend to spin slower and are cheaper. That much >>> I have figured out. Other than that, I can't see any other difference. >>> Data speeds seem to be about the same. >>> >> >> They have an ugly tendency to nod off at 6 second intervals. >> This runs up "193 Load_Cycle_Count" unacceptably: as many >> as a few hundred thousand in a year & a million cycles is >> getting close to the lifetime limit on most hard drives. I end >> up running some iteration of >> # hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda >> every boot. >> > > Very true about the 193 count. Here's a drive in a system that was > built in Jan., 2010 so it's a bit over 2 years old at this point. It's > on 24/7 and not rebooted except for more major updates, etc. My tests > say the drive spins down and starts back up every 2 minutes and has > been doing so for about 28 months. IIRC the 193 spec on this drive was > something like 300000 max with the drive currently clocking in at > 700488. I don't see any evidence that it's going to fail but I am > trying to make sure it's backed up often. Being that it's gone >2x at > this point I will swap the drive out in the early summer no matter > what. This week I'll be visiting where the machine is so I'm going to > put a backup drive in the box to get ready. >
Yes, I just learned about this problem in 2009 or so, & checked on my FreeBSD laptop, which turned out to be at >400000. It only made it another month or so before having unrecoverable errors. Now, I can't conclusively demonstrate that the 193 Load_Cycle_Count was somehow causitive, but I gots my suspicions. Many of 'em highly suspectable.
