[mythtvnz] HDD Load Cycle Count ticking over too fast [SOLVED (sort of)]

[David Moore]

Well it's official. I really am very thick. I just could not understand 
why a non-system drive should have constant disk access when it is 
completely idle. So I used iotop to see what was happening and sure 
enough nothing was touching the drive. Then the penny finally dropped. 
Of course. It's bleeding obvious. Every time you run smartctl you wake 
up the drive so if it's parked the LCC increments by one. So by checking 
the LCC every 15s I was causing it to increment every 15s because the WD 
green drives intellipark every 8s.

So now the only question is whether typical usage of the disk will cause 
excessive load cycles. From smartctl stats it seems not. I calculate it 
will take about 12 years to reach 300,000 cycles based on past usage. So 
nothing to worry about after all.

BTW observing that the interval between disk I/O on my system drive 
(WD10EADS-00L5B1) is frequently more than 8s but the LCC count is low on 
this drive I must have lucked out with the firmware (01.01A01) on the 
drive, i.e., it doesn't intellipark every 8s.