I set up a home server about a year ago, using Ubuntu server (10.04 LTS at the moment), four disks in RAID 5 for storage (WD Green 1.5 TB) and a laptop drive for the OS.
Today the output of smartctl, a command line utility for checking the SMART attributes of a hard drive, tells me that the primary OS drive has had no less than 186,000 start-stop cycles in 325 days and may be nearing the end of its lifespan.
The smartctl output is in
"normalized values", in this case a
number between 200 and 000, where 200
is "brand new" and 000 means
"worn out". My disk gets 001.
So I wonder what happened: 186k start/stop cycles in 7820 hours is about one start/stop per 2.5 minutes around the clock. This seems somewhat excessive for a computer that sees actual use once or twice per day. (The RAID disks are normal, averaging to one start/stop per day, as expected.)
Does anyone have similar experiences, or pointers to what might be the issue here?
Specifically I'd like to know
Why the massive start/stop count? Do I have some sort of configuration issue? Could there be a background service that is causing trouble?
Could having a laptop disk as the OS drive be part of the problem? Can anyone confirm or deny this?
Here is the /etc/hdparm.conf configuration
/dev/sda {
apm = 127
spindown_time = 120
}
and the most relevant parts of smartctl --attributes /dev/sda:
smartctl version 5.38 [x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x002f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 0
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 001 001 000 Old_age Always - 185875
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 090 090 000 Old_age Always - 7820
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 109
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 118 118 000 Old_age Always - 246833
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 107 098 000 Old_age Always - 36
As I generally prefer my drives to last more than a year, any advice is appreciated.
