intellipark leads to high load cycle count

[Michiel Boland]

Hi. I have one of those new green WD HDs with Intellipark, that is, they like
to park their heads every 8 seconds. As a result the load cycle count grows at
an alarming rate. (If I understand correctly this number should not exceed about
300k or so.)

# dmesg | grep ad4
ad4: 953869MB <WDC WD10EARS-00Y5B1 80.00A80> at ata2-master UDMA100
GEOM: ad4: partition 1 does not start on a track boundary.
GEOM: ad4: partition 1 does not end on a track boundary.
GEOM: ad4s1: geometry does not match label (32h,32s != 16h,63s).
Trying to mount root from ufs:/dev/ad4s1a

# smartctl -a /dev/ad4 | grep Load
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 188 188 000 Old_age Always -
38319

Is there any way to turn off or increase the 8-second timeout? Or do I have to
bin the disk and use something better?

I don't want to boot into DOS, windows or any of that stuff. I also tried
ataidle to no effect.

Cheers
Michiel

[Peter Jeremy]

On 2010-Mar-23 23:05:41 +0100, Michiel Boland <mic...@boland.org> wrote:
>Is there any way to turn off or increase the 8-second timeout? Or do
>I have to bin the disk and use something better?

All I can suggest is a small daemon that just forces the disk to do
physical I/O every couple of seconds.

--
Peter Jeremy

[Michiel Boland]

Aravind K. Mikkilineni wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Mar 2010 Michiel Boland <mic...@boland.org> wrote

>
>> Hi. I have one of those new green WD HDs with Intellipark, that is, they
>> like to park their heads every 8 seconds. As a result the load cycle count
>> grows at an alarming rate. (If I understand correctly this number should not
>> exceed about 300k or so.)
>>

>> Is there any way to turn off or increase the 8-second timeout? Or do I have
>> to bin the disk and use something better?
>

> I have some older GP drives which do not seem to ever park their heads. The
> newer GP drives I have behave as you described.
>
> I have had success either turning off the head parking or greatly reducing it
> by doing 'hdparm -S 0 -B 254 <device>'. Either '-B 254' or -B 255' depending
> on the drive.

I guess 'hdparm -B' is equivalent to 'ataidle -P'? In this case I'm out of luck:

# ataidle -P 254 /dev/ad4
ataidle: the device does not support advanced power management

Cheers
Michiel

[Aravind K. Mikkilineni]

On Tue, 23 Mar 2010 Michiel Boland <mic...@boland.org> wrote

>Hi. I have one of those new green WD HDs with Intellipark, that is, they
>like to park their heads every 8 seconds. As a result the load cycle count
>grows at an alarming rate. (If I understand correctly this number should not
>exceed about 300k or so.)
>
>Is there any way to turn off or increase the 8-second timeout? Or do I have
>to bin the disk and use something better?

I have some older GP drives which do not seem to ever park their heads. The
newer GP drives I have behave as you described.

I have had success either turning off the head parking or greatly reducing it
by doing 'hdparm -S 0 -B 254 <device>'. Either '-B 254' or -B 255' depending

on the drive. I use these drives in a home file server, though, so I/O
to/from the drives is either non-existant most of the time (heads stay
parked) or there is continuous I/O (rdiff backups, etc.; heads stay
unparked).

-akm