I recently bought a cheap 2.5 inch Seagate ST1000LM048 1TB drive for a small Dell Optiplex 990 system I have. I’m using the system as a basic lab shell host and to host a local http mirror for some often-used software from work. The Optiplex is an ultra small form factor system so it only accepts 2.5 inch laptop drives. I was going to put an SSD in it however in this case space > speed and I didn’t want to spend a fortune on this machine as it’s 6 years old.<\/p>\n
One thing I noticed with this cheap $60 drive is it seems to have fairly aggressive APM features. In 12 hours of on-time it incremented the Load_Cycle_Count over 300.<\/p>\n
[root@shell ~]# smartctl -a \/dev\/sda |grep Load_Cycle_Count
\n193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always – 315<\/p>\n
I did some research online and it seems to be a fairly common issue. I remember having this issue with some WD Green drives 5 or 6 years ago. I hear if you contact Seagate support they have a tool called SeaChestUtilities that can permanently disable some drive power features however the easier route for me is to use the linux hdparm tool.<\/p>\n
The solution then was to use hdparm to adjust the APM timer for the drive. After a quick yum search I located hdparm and installed it. Running hdparm -B \/dev\/sda will tell you the current value from 1-255, with 1 being the most aggressive power saving and 255 being disabled.<\/p>\n
Since this system will be online 24×7 I chose to disable mine with hdparm -B 255 \/dev\/sda although I also see people suggesting a value of 254. You may want to play with the value to find the best results for you, especially if you’re using a battery powered device.<\/p>\n
The only issue with this approach is the fix is only temporary and is lost on the next reboot. I looked at the hdparm man-page and it suggests using \/etc\/hdparm.conf for permanent changes however on RHEL7\/CentOS7 there isn’t a systemd unit file for hdparm so it’s not entirely clear if the file will be read on boot. I opted to go the the easiest way and add my hdparm string to \/etc\/rc.d\/rc.local:<\/p>\n
[root@shell ~]# grep hdparm \/etc\/rc.d\/rc.local
\n\/usr\/sbin\/hdparm -B 255 \/dev\/sda
\n[root@shell ~]# chmod u+x \/etc\/rc.d\/rc.local
\n[root@shell ~]# systemctl enable rc-local<\/p>\n
[root@shell ~]# systemctl status rc-local
\n\u00e2\u2014\u008f rc-local.service – \/etc\/rc.d\/rc.local Compatibility
\nLoaded: loaded (\/usr\/lib\/systemd\/system\/rc-local.service; static; vendor preset: disabled)
\nActive: active (exited) since Tue 2018-03-27 16:36:17 MDT; 26min ago<\/p>\n
Mar 27 16:36:17 shell.sysop.ca systemd[1]: Starting \/etc\/rc.d\/rc.local Compatibility…
\nMar 27 16:36:17 shell.sysop.ca rc.local[15796]: \/dev\/sda:
\nMar 27 16:36:17 shell.sysop.ca rc.local[15796]: setting Advanced Power Management level to disabled
\nMar 27 16:36:17 shell.sysop.ca rc.local[15796]: APM_level = off
\nMar 27 16:36:17 shell.sysop.ca systemd[1]: Started \/etc\/rc.d\/rc.local Compatibility.<\/p>\n
Now every time on boot it will adjust the drive’s APM settings. In the last 8 hours the Load_Cycle_Count has not increased.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I recently bought a cheap 2.5 inch Seagate ST1000LM048 1TB drive for a small Dell Optiplex 990 system I have. I’m using the system as a basic lab shell host and to host a local http mirror for some often-used software from work. The Optiplex is an ultra small form factor system so it only … <\/p>\n