Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Frank Steinmetzger <Warp_7@×××.de>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Are those "green" drives any good?
Date: Sat, 12 May 2012 18:52:31
Message-Id: 20120512185035.GA4716@eisen.fritz.box
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-user] Are those "green" drives any good? by Norman Invasion
1 On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 12:20:57PM -0400, Norman Invasion wrote:
2 > On 9 May 2012 04:47, Dale <rdalek1967@×××××.com> wrote:
3 > > Hi,
4 > >
5 > > As some know, I'm planning to buy me a LARGE hard drive to put all my
6 > > videos on, eventually.  The prices are coming down now.  I keep seeing
7 > > these "green" drives that are made by just about every company nowadays.
8 > >  When comparing them to a non "green" drive, do they hold up as good?
9 > > Are they as dependable as a plain drive?  I guess they are more
10 > > efficient and I get that but do they break quicker, more often or no
11 > > difference?
12 > >
13 > > I have noticed that they tend to spin slower and are cheaper.  That much
14 > > I have figured out.  Other than that, I can't see any other difference.
15 > >  Data speeds seem to be about the same.
16 > >
17 >
18 > They have an ugly tendency to nod off at 6 second intervals.
19 > This runs up "193 Load_Cycle_Count" unacceptably: as many
20 > as a few hundred thousand in a year & a million cycles is
21 > getting close to the lifetime limit on most hard drives. I end
22 > up running some iteration of
23 > # hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda
24 > every boot.
25
26 I bought my current internal laptop disk for Christmas 2008. It's a Samsung
27 HM500JI (with 500 GB). Early on I noticed that, according to smartctl, its
28 Load_Cycle_Count is increasing every 2 or 3 seconds. I even asked Samsung
29 about this, but they either couldn't give any clue or didn't want to, b/c the
30 Serial Number is from Turkey, so not from the European market.
31
32 Anyhoo... I just checked the values:
33 Power on hours: 11500
34 Start/stop count: 2797
35 Power cycle count: 2197
36
37 But the load cycle count is at almost 12.3 million(!). That just can't be
38 right. I stopped believing that number a good while ago.
39
40
41 OTOH, I just became a bit nervous when looking at smartctl's output...
42 Reallocated sectors: 7 (threshold 10)
43 Calibration retry count: 1631
44 Load retry count: 1631
45 --
46 Gruß | Greetings | Qapla'
47 Please do not share anything from, with or about me with any Facebook service.
48
49 Humans lose most of their time trying to gain time.

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those "green" drives any good? David Haller <gentoo@×××××××.de>