HDD head parking on FreeBSD (Load_Cycle_Count)

Usually  hdd for notebooks (and some models for desktop, for example models of  WD Caviar Green series) includes function of head parking for powersave. This function parks heads after few seconds of inactivity.A lot of head parkings isn’t good for hdd.

You can check your smart data using utility smartmontools:

howtobsd# smartctl -a /dev/ad0 | grep Load_Cycle_Count
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 37104

37104 – it is a number of parking (only imagine it! On my laptop before fixing this value had been increased on 50 numbers per\hour)

For prevent hdd from  head parking or change timeout you can use ataidle.

howtobsd# cd /usr/ports/sysutils/ataidle/
howtobsd# make install clean
howtobsd# ataidle -P 254 /dev/ad0

This commands set APM (Advanced Power Management) to highest power consumption.

and add into rc.conf:
ataidle_enable="YES"
ataidle_devices="ad0"
ataidle_ad0="-I 60 -S 120 -A 127 -P 254"

Posted on October 18th, 2010 by admin
Filed under: Solutions