Hi all, I just registered in this board and want to say hello anyone.
This post is a variant of the problem about Load Cycle Count SMART parameter, which is growing up stunning fastly with fedora and ubuntu distributions.
My notebook has a Western digital Scorpio drive, which has an 8 seconds idle time. After the idle time, the hard drive parks its heads, then every read or write to the disk will let the drive unpark the heads. Everytime the drive parks and unparks the heads, the Load Cycle Count parameter get increased. The problem is that there's an estimated upper limit of around 300k cycles.
I asked WD for a tool to remove or control such idling feature, but got nothing. The unofficial wdidle3 tool flying around the net is not useful with newer WD drives. Actually it caused my drive to behave in a very bad way and I suggest not to use it at all on newer drives, like Scorpio.
I noticed that the problem is happening much more when I use fedora instead of windows, and much more when I use firefox under fedora, mainly because firefox has the bad habit to save its session every 10 seconds.
So the drive goes idle after 8 seconds, then after 2 seconds it is woken up by firefox, then goes idle after 8 seconds again and so on...
I can give two suggestions for this:
1) Go in
about:config page, find the key
browser.sessionstore.interval and set it to a much higher value than the default (which is 10000 milliseconds, so 10 seconds).
2) As above, but use a smaller value (eg. 5 seconds): this will prevent the disk from going to standby at all, but will increase its temperatures too.
I hope this will help some people.
Hybrid Mode
