intellipark leads to high load cycle count

[Aravind K. Mikkilineni]

On Tue, 23 Mar 2010 Michiel Boland <michiel at boland.org> wrote

>Hi. I have one of those new green WD HDs with Intellipark, that is, they  
>like to park their heads every 8 seconds. As a result the load cycle count 
>grows at an alarming rate. (If I understand correctly this number should not 
>exceed about 300k or so.)
>
>Is there any way to turn off or increase the 8-second timeout? Or do I have 
>to bin the disk and use something better?

I have some older GP drives which do not seem to ever park their heads. The 
newer GP drives I have behave as you described.

I have had success either turning off the head parking or greatly reducing it 
by doing 'hdparm -S 0 -B 254 <device>'. Either '-B 254' or -B 255' depending 
on the drive. I use these drives in a home file server, though, so I/O 
to/from the drives is either non-existant most of the time (heads stay 
parked) or there is continuous I/O (rdiff backups, etc.; heads stay 
unparked).

	-akm