HDD SMART load/unload/start/stop questions...

[Tengis]

I FINALLY got my drives set up properly last night to spin down in Ubuntu after dicking around for a week.

I set up a cronjob to run a simple command on an empty folder on each drive every ten minutes from 10am to 10pm so that they will not spin down. After that they should listen to the settings in SmartD and spindown after 30 minutes and stay spun down since nobody should be accessing them after about 10pm. The start/stop count went up by 1 since yesterday but the load/unload went up by about 49 on each drive.

What exactly do each of these SMART parameters mean and what would be an acceptable amount for them to increase in a 24 hour period. Im trying to gauge what is actually good and bad.

Start/Stop Count - Im assuming this means the disk actually goes into sleep mode and stops spinning. This went up once since yesterday with the settings I have in place.

Power Cycle - self explanatory.

Power-off Retract Count - ??

Load/Unload Cycle Count - Im assuming this means how often the head engages or disengages the platter? This went up by about 49 on all my drives since yesterday.

Thoughts?

 

[drescherjm]

Load/Unload Cycle Count - Im assuming this means how often the head engages or disengages the platter?

Yes. This is how often the head is parked.

BTW: Thank You. I see one of my 4TB drives is doing that. 17K head parks in 5 or so months.

93 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 092 092 000 Old_age Always - 17226

 

[Tengis]

Bump.

Should I disable head parking and allow them to spin down?

Allow them to head park but not spin down?

I feel like there is so much bad information on the internet. SO MANY diy people claiming they know whats best because they built a nas with ten drives and "two failed in a couple months".

 

[drescherjm]

Should I disable head parking

I did that on my WDC green drives right after got them years ago. However I have not turned off head parking with the Seagate 4TB yet.

Allow them to head park but not spin down?

At home on some drives I use a spindown time with hdparm that is several hours. For others the software I use will spin them back up anyways so there is no point.

ten drives and "two failed in a couple months".

Drives will fail regardless of your usage. Some will arrive DOA or die in weeks while others will last longer than their 5 year life expectancy. Luck comes into play. The expectation is somewhere between 1% to 10% of all drives (1 to 5 years old) will fail each year.

http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/archive/disk_failures.pdf
http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/11/12/how-long-do-disk-drives-last/
http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/

 

[Lost-Benji]

Heads need to park before the drive spools down.

 

[drescherjm]

Heads need to park before the drive spools down.

Some green drives park their heads every X seconds of inactivity even though the drive still spins.

 

[Tengis]

My Toshiba 3tb drives will park their heads after maybe 2 minutes or so (never timed it exactly). If I set APM to anything over 127 then it shows APM as being OFF even though the 500gb Maxtor drive I have will show whatever perameter I input into hdparm -B.

Bleh.

 

[bigdogchris]

I have a 3TB Toshiba drive that seems to be heard parking all the time now. I've had the drive for months and it's not done this until recently.

What are the options to disable APM/Head Parking on Windows? Shut off hard drive in power management is 0.

I did recently upgrade RST to 13.1 from 12.9. Does Intel change power settings in their drivers?

 

[Skryabin]

I have a 3TB Toshiba drive that seems to be heard parking all the time now. I've had the drive for months and it's not done this until recently.

What are the options to disable APM/Head Parking on Windows? Shut off hard drive in power management is 0.

I did recently upgrade RST to 13.1 from 12.9. Does Intel change power settings in their drivers?

Yes, 13.1 increased the clicks on my hitachi hdd too...too many apm/head parkings and the downgrade to 12.9 it's not an easy way. You have to reinstall 12.9, unplug power, swap sata channel, and finally clicks go away...it's unacceptable.

Someone says clicks happen every few seconds, in my case I can hear the clicks every 2-3 minutes but definitely it's something different from before...at first I thought my disk was going to die, I noticed the increased clicks as soon I installed the 13.1 driver.

I hope intel releases a fix soon (that doesn't imply opening your pc and move cables) and/or says something in their forums:
https://communities.intel.com/message/243535

more info here:
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=388210