Ok, I had a couple of issues moving from Opensuse 10.2 to opensuse 10.3,
so I gave a try to kubuntu.
Since I saw a couple of post (initally from slahdot) regarding a problem with hard drives on ubuntu,
I checked mine.
For a description of the bug, see here :
basically some Bios setting may ask for too many hard-drive heads retracting, resulting in fast hard drive degradation:
http://ubuntudemon.wordpress.com/2007/10/2...ritical-status/
I was afraid of that, since On my suse's I could here regular 'ticks' from the hard drive.
After installing the now infamous smart package utility, I found out that I have
Quote:
mathias@mathias-laptop:~/src/smartmontools-5.37$ sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda |grep Load_Cycle_Count
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0012 046 046 000 Old_age Always - 543684[/b]
|
543684 load cycles, for a life expectation of 600.000 !!
This is bad bad bad news...
Regarding hardware/distro history on my laptop:
Quote:
laptop
toshiba Satellite M45 S331 (bought in april 2005)
1Gb ram
hard drive :
Model Family: Hitachi Travelstar 80GN family
Device Model: IC25N080ATMR04-0
Serial Number: MRG40FK4JBZWAH
Firmware Version: MO4OAD4A
User Capacity: 80,026,361,856 bytes
distros installed on this :
Fedora core 3 (one week)
Suse 9.1 9.2 9.3(?)
Suse 10.0, 10.1 10.2 (all suse together : two years)
and ... kubuntu 7.10 (for approximatively 2 hours)
[/b]
|
Please note that I used to run a lot of computations (maths) on my laptop, and hence it was on 24/24, 7/7 for approximatively two years (and hence, even if the HD it does die, I won't complain too much - at least I can take counter measures)
I think It might be worth for the suse community to check the status here.
One solution is to get / compile smart tools from here
Get tarball here ([edit] : no need, apparently it is already in distro [/edit])
http://sourceforge.net/projects/smartmontools/
how to use :
http://prefetch.net/articles/diskdrives.smart.html
and here
http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
Cheers
[EDIT] : I forgot to mention, that at first, on kubuntu, the HD would make same regular weird clicking as it used to on my different Suse's. Since I issued the "sudo hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda" command (please, read about this before hpdarm'ing) , it stopped clicking... and the load cycle number has not changed for 10 minutes now.