Very high HDD load/unload cycles and hardware ECC (SMART)

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Level 1

65 points

Very high HDD load/unload cycles and hardware ECC (SMART)

Hello,

I just took a look at my Seagate HDDs SMART values and found 2 very high numbers:

Load/Unload Cycle Count: 29.422, and increasing +1 like every 15 seconds, together with a clunking noise.

Hardware ECC Recovered: 320.239.221, and increasing +10 or more like every second.

The Load/Unload stuff seems to be aggressive power management of either the drive itself or the OS, I have no clue how to stop this. I tried keeping the drive busy with declunk, but it still parks the heads every few seconds.

But what is Hardware ECC ? And can anyone give me an advice on how to stop my drive moving the heads to the parking position every 15 seconds ? When I used Tiger, opening Photo Booth did the trick, doesn't work on Leopard tho. The HDD is less than 1 month old...

Apple MacBook Pro 15.4" 2.4 GHz, Mac OS X (10.5), 160 GB 7200 rpm Seagate HDD

Posted on Nov 18, 2007 4:35 PM

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Answer 1

Nov 18, 2007 5:49 PM in response to Dragonguard

I hope the second item in http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/11/06/applechastised_for_ignoring_two_mac_data_lossissues.html
doesn't apply to you, but just in case...

I imagine that ECC is "error correcting code". Wikipedia says " Hardware ECC Recovered: Time between ECC-corrected errors."

I have no idea about head parking.

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Answer 2

Dragonguard Author

Level 1

65 points

Nov 18, 2007 6:31 PM in response to Mr.Lobotomy

Hello,

thanks for the helpful answer, my Seagate HDD has firmware 3.DAE as shown in the system profiler so I should be alright. Only the clunking noise drives me mad, especially in a silent room or when working at night... No point having one of the most silent / powerful laptops on this planet when the HDD clunk is omnipresent.

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Answer 3

Arman V.

Level 1

0 points

Nov 28, 2007 1:59 PM in response to Dragonguard

I guess we are dealing with the same problem ~> http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1264328&stqc=true
Googled a bit more and found this thread http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=72620.
So I believe we definitely know what's wrong but don't know how to fix it 😟

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Answer 4

dentnz

Level 1

10 points

Dec 27, 2007 3:57 PM in response to Arman V.

I too was getting so annoyed by the clunking sounds. The APM settings for the HDD are obviously out of whack completely. Tried Declunk which has been mentioned in other threads in the forums. It basically runs as a daemon making a small file and then deleting it every 5 seconds. I got it to work, but I had to introduce an additional parameter string to force it to create the file every 4 seconds. Visit http://kiza.kcore.de/software/declunk/ for more information on this issue.

Overall, I was still unhappy with the solution. Creating a file ever few seconds isn't optimal.

Having tested disabling the APM settings with hdparm for WinXP (Via Bootcamp) and found that it fixed the clunking sound, I knew that APM was definitely causing the sound. Of course, hdparm did not update the firmware of the hdd, so every time I powered down my MBP, the hdd would go back to APM being on "FULL" bringing
back the "clunk" sound.

The ideal solution was to obtain some kind of APM management software for OSX. Unfortunately, the historical application known as APM Tuner X was no longer being developed by the author and does not run in Leopard.

Thats when I found HDAPM!!!

http://mckinlay.net.nz/hdapm/

How did you determine the load/unload cycles for your HDD? In the end I located a copy of smartmon for Windows and booted into WinXp (via Bootcamp). I think my cycles are up to over 100,000... 😟 Not sure how to easily tell?!

Anyway, I hope that this solves your issue. Apple's Energy Saving system preference pane SHOULD disable putting the hard disk to sleep if left unchecked, but I also believe this is an issue with many HDD's. Seagate are shocking when it comes to releasing firmware upgrades too by the looks of things.

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Answer 5

PLB

Level 1

111 points

Jan 31, 2008 6:45 AM in response to dentnz

I too have a chirping/clunking hard drive, a new Western Digital that has produced this problem for lots of people. I solved it for a while with APM Tuner X but now that I run Leopard the noise is back. Using the Energy Saver settings hasn't helped. I downloaded hdapm but don't know how to use it. Can you talk me through it?
Thanks - I really don't mind the noise but HATE that my new drive is aging so fast.

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