Hard Hard Drive Killer Bug - Is Suse Subject To That Horrible Bug Too

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

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:

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.

smartmontools is already in the OpenSUSE distro, no need to compile.

Ouch !
Sorry, I did not now that - and I have no working Suse anymore (I spend an entire day trying to get a working 10.3, though)

Well here's a reminder to people that to save yourself wasted effort you should check for the availability of software in this order:

OpenSUSE media or online repos
Additional repositories, vendor and volunteer
Vendor repositories, e.g. Skype, latest versions of Java
Bleeding edge repositories, e.g. KotD
Source packages for roll-your-own

This may only refer to SATA drives, I have a Maxtor UDMA drive with SMART monitoring capability. As I have more than 23 partitions, I dont use the SATA limitation of 15 partitions, and append hwprobe=-modules.pata to my grub configuration.
In this case with hda smartctl reports:

smartctl -a /dev/hda | grep Load_Cycle_Count
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 253 253 000 Old_age Always - 0


Information for drive:

orac:/home/anc # smartctl -i /dev/hda
smartctl version 5.37 [i686-suse-linux-gnu] Copyright © 2002-6 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family: Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 family
Device Model: Maxtor 6Y160P0
Serial Number: Y44QPY5E
Firmware Version: YAR41BW0
User Capacity: 163,928,604,672 bytes
Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is: 7
ATA Standard is: ATA/ATAPI-7 T13 1532D revision 0
Local Time is: Sat Nov 3 10:19:52 2007 GMT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

Hi

My hard drive returns this

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family: Hitachi Travelstar 80GN family
Device Model: IC25N080ATMR04-0
Serial Number: MRG40FK4JBZWAH
Firmware Version: MO4OAD4A
User Capacity: 80,026,361,856 bytes
Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is: 6
ATA Standard is: ATA/ATAPI-6 T13 1410D revision 3a
Local Time is: Sat Nov 3 11:50:23 2007 CET
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

and with a couple of XP/ubuntu boots since yesterday, I got a + 15 load cycles (seems pretty decent, meaning the solution proposed in the links above do work):
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0012 046 046 000 Old_age Always - 543699

The SMART capability is on the drive itself and the information returned should be the same whether you have to address it as /dev/hda or /dev/sda due the modules you have loaded.

I think I owe the fix I used.

As mentioned before, I first tried the hdparm'ing things, but then, I found the default setting can be changed by specific HDD manufacturer tools. I like it better, since It means a reinstall won't require to fix it again - and also I don't believe it is an OS issue.

See here for original idea :
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=368...mp;postcount=22

And here for hitashi feature tool, that allows changing apm parameters directly on the hard drive :
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm