hdparm load cycle/head parking question
 

Hi,

I've been doing some research regarding the Load Cycle Count on laptops. Mine is increasing by approximately 6 per minute. This barely changes between "hdparm -B 1" and "hdparm -B 253". If I set "hdparm -B 255" after 10 minutes, I do not get a single increase (as expected).

That is fine, but is it? I read that the hard drive is parking the heads to protect itself (with a "hdparm -B 128" for example). This is my question; what is the risk of not parking the heads (by running hdparm -B 255")?

Even though my hard drive will last a number of years with 6 increases per minute, the clicking of the hard drive is really annoying. Setting it to not park the heads is much more peaceful!

Thanks

Heads parking for protection (shock sensor) is different from the ancient party game of "parking heads" (as played in the decade when carpet still was shaggy, furniture included Lava lamps, cars had more fins than a Lockheed Constellation and Jack Vance wrote "The Pnume"). If you've researched the "issue" then you should have stumbled across a Slashdot thread indicating a "parking bug" which was not a GNU/Linux or 'hdparm' problem but basically HW manufacturers fscking up (assuming all HDs are written to constantly and only by mcrsft wndws). http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf says there's no correlation between Load/Unload Cycle Counts and failure rates. More tech details at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_di...oad_technology.