While Windows 7 seems to run quite okay as a QEMU-KVM guest on my home server – which I will cover in another posting – there are a few things that I’ve noticed and that should be kept in mind when playing around with such setup.
I recently noticed a rather high “load cycle count” SMART value (“smartctl –all“) for my new harddrives that are only in operation for a few hours. Sure thing, I also heard the clicking noise of load-/unloading disk heads every now and then.
193 Load_Cycle_Count       0x0032  100  100  000   Old_age  Always      -      395
As the number of load cycles is somewhat limited – a rather high value, but limited nevertheless – over the lifetime of the disk I decided to disable the disk power management feature that caused these load cycles.
I guess S.M.A.R.T (“Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology“) as used in harddrives is already well-known, therefore just a short reminder about its usage with Linux.
I recently bought two Seagate Barracuda 7200 3000GB (SATA 6Gb/s) drives to be used in a Linux software RAID. I knew I had to be careful because of the Advanced Format (AF) layout used by these new drives. Turns out that this wasn’t the only thing that one has to keep in mind when dealing with such drives – GPT BIOS boot partition, anyone?