Laptops, power management, and Ubuntu [LWN.net]

Laptops, power management, and Ubuntu

Posted Nov 9, 2007 12:46 UTC (Fri) by canatella (subscriber, #6745)
In reply to: Laptops, power management, and Ubuntu by kevinbsmith
Parent article: Laptops, power management, and Ubuntu

Maybe the 1.2 million cycles are due to a previous installation, or maybe it's a bug in your
smart implementation (I've read about that somewhere). Anyway, the number which is important
to you today is the number of cycle per day or per hour. If the head parks 1000 times a day,
the drive will reach the 600000 cycles in two years. So if you hope to have your disk last at
least 3 years, check that your cycle number per day is less than 600000/(365 * 3) => 547.

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Laptops, power management, and Ubuntu

Posted Nov 9, 2007 18:24 UTC (Fri) by kevinbsmith (guest, #4778) [Link]

Yesterday I was just below 1235000, and today I'm at 1239893, so the number is still
increasing very quickly. Several cycles per minute that the computer is turned on.

Laptops, power management, and Ubuntu

Posted Nov 11, 2007 13:23 UTC (Sun) by hein.zelle (guest, #33324) [Link]

I'm a bit surprised by remarks like "if you hope to keep your drive for 3 years".  I'm used to
ide drives lasting 10 years and up in desktops.  I would _at the very least_ expect a drive to
last for the common lifetime of a computer.  These days i use a linux machine at least 3,
usually 4-5 years before performance drops too far behind.  Anything less is not an acceptable
"expected lifetime", to me.