Archive for the ‘Storage’ Category

Harddrive load cycles

Saturday, October 27th, 2012

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.

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S.M.A.R.T.

Saturday, October 27th, 2012

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.

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3TB harddrives and Linux

Saturday, October 27th, 2012

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?

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