FreeBSD and large harddrives

[Bruce Cran]

On Thu, 18 Nov 2010 22:44:12 +0000
Paul Wootton <paul at fletchermoorland.co.uk> wrote:

> Here is a copy from smartctl
>   9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   092   092   000    Old_age   
> Always       -       5958
> 193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   001   001   000    Old_age   
> Always       -       885346
> 
> The drive has less than 250 days online, but is nearly at tripple the 
> rated load/unload cycle.
> While the drive is still working, I have NO faith in it anymore and
> am just waiting for it to die.

It seems almost necessary to use WD's wdidle3.exe utility to disable
the aggressive power management. I'm at 27002 hours and 39405 load
cycles so far. More worrying perhaps is that there's already a
reallocated sector and a few uncorrectable errors logged. Having said
that I got a brand new disk yesterday and found the
"Multi_Zone_Error_Rate" was non-zero so I think people should probably
stop worrying about the raw value and learn to focus on the
Value/Worst/Thesh fields instead. 

-- 
Bruce Cran