[kwlug-disc] Disk longevity ...

Ron Singh ronsingh149 at gmail.com
Sun Feb 13 12:58:20 EST 2022


That is the exact HDD we use in a Raid50 array in our workplace server,
running since 2011 on an Asus ATX P6X58D-E. Zero failures since and likely
only rebooted twice a year as my IT guy is plenty conservative about
applying OS patches(MS SVR2012). Damn good drives.

And yeah Khalid, I should be less nervous about doing a dist-upgrade,
especially on the server edition of Ubuntu:-)
My travel laptop is still on Lubuntu 16.04, I will do the upgrade to 18.04
and then onto 20.04 and see how that goes. It might be a challenge as the
GUI changes from LXDE to LXqT, but worth a shot since it's an easily
re-buildable OS profile(small amount of /home contents).

Ron S.



On Sun, Feb 13, 2022 at 12:26 PM Khalid Baheyeldin <kb at 2bits.com> wrote:

> Here is something surprising (to me at least) ...
>
> My home server has been running for over 11 years continuously, and when I
> saw the statistics on S.M.A.R.T and the file system, I thought these must
> be shared.
>
> The 'server' is an Acer Desktop, circa 2010 AMD Athlon II X4 with 4GB of
> RAM, with a BIOS only (no UEFI).
> The hard disk is a 1TB Hitachi
>
> According to SMART, as of late January:
>
> Model Family:     Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B
> Device Model:     Hitachi HDT721010SLA360
> Firmware Version: ST6OA31B
> User Capacity:    1,000,204,886,016 bytes [1.00 TB]
> Sector Size:      512 bytes logical/physical
> Rotation Rate:    7200 rpm
> ATA Version is:   ATA8-ACS T13/1699-D revision 4
> SATA Version is:  SATA 2.6, 3.0 Gb/s
>
> Here are the relevant entries:
>
>   9 Power_On_Hours          0x0012   086   086   000    Old_age   Always
>     -       101024
>  12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always
>     -       65
>
> That 101024 hours is 11.5 years of the disk spinning continuously with 65
> power cycles over that period.
>
> And per tune2fs, this ext3 file system was created on July 2010!
>
> Last mounted on:          /
> Filesystem magic number:  0xEF53
> Filesystem revision #:    1 (dynamic)
> Filesystem features:      has_journal ext_attr resize_inode dir_index
> filetype needs_recovery sparse_super large_file
> Filesystem flags:         signed_directory_hash
> Filesystem state:         clean
> Errors behavior:          Continue
> Filesystem OS type:       Linux
> Inode count:              60317696
> Block count:              241244080
> Reserved block count:     12062204
> Free blocks:              125567107
> Free inodes:              58960270
> First block:              0
> Block size:               4096
> Fragment size:            4096
> Reserved GDT blocks:      966
> Blocks per group:         32768
> Fragments per group:      32768
> Inodes per group:         8192
> Inode blocks per group:   256
> Filesystem created:       Mon Jul 19 15:48:26 2010
> Mount count:              2
> Maximum mount count:      23
> Last checked:             Fri Dec 31 15:44:08 2021
> Check interval:           15552000 (6 months)
> Next check after:         Wed Jun 29 16:44:08 2022
> Lifetime writes:          13 TB
>
> The disk is only half full (~ 500GB).
>
> I am impressed that a spinning disk can last that long.
>
> The Hitachi disk was copied to another disk that is ext4, and is running
> on the new motherboard with UEFI, USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps.
>
> And a note to Ron!
> The above shows I have been upgrading in-place continually from at least
> Ubuntu 10.04 (and maybe 8.04) to 20.04.
> No fresh install with every LTS release. At least for a server with no GUI
> and desktop apps.
> --
> Khalid Baheyeldin
> _______________________________________________
> kwlug-disc mailing list
> kwlug-disc at kwlug.org
> https://kwlug.org/mailman/listinfo/kwlug-disc_kwlug.org
>
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