Hard drive odometer

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Spektro
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Hard drive odometer

Post by Spektro »

Hi,

While I was testing an old hard drive through USB, it crossed my mind that a hard drive odometer would be handy. Drive's age doesn't tell you how worn the drive is but the number of read and write operations does - or at least give you a better idea of the matter.

I don't know if the modern drives (SMART drives) have odometers built-in, but the OS or file system could also do the counting. RAWBInfo and Info command could display the odometer values to the user.
- Janne Peräaho
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nbache
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Re: Hard drive odometer

Post by nbache »

Spektro wrote:I don't know if the modern drives (SMART drives) have odometers built-in, but the OS or file system could also do the counting.
What if you move the drive between machines, or you dual-boot from different system partitions? No, I think that kind of information belongs on the drive, and administered by its own firmware.
RAWBInfo and Info command could display the odometer values to the user.
They still could, I suppose, just as well as smartctl already can. I'm not sure which value would be best as an "odometer", but smartctl -a x.device:y, where x is your device driver name and y is the unit number (e.g. sb600sata.device:0) gives a number of interesting values, among them Spin_Up_Time, Power_On_Hours, Power_Cycle_Count, Head_Flying_Hours, Total_LBAs_Written, and Total_LBAs_Read.

Best regards,

Niels
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Re: Hard drive odometer

Post by zzd10h »

@Spektro
Or use SMARTDock docky from the AmiOuest team to monitor your hard drive

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http://os4depot.net/index.php?function= ... rtdock.lha
http://apps.amistore.net/zTools
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Spektro
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Re: Hard drive odometer

Post by Spektro »

nbache wrote:What if you move the drive between machines, or you dual-boot from different system partitions? No, I think that kind of information belongs on the drive, and administered by its own firmware.
Yes, that would be a problem. The read/write counts would not be accurate, if they aren't updated by the disk itself.
nbache wrote:I'm not sure which value would be best as an "odometer", but smartctl -a x.device:y, where x is your device driver name and y is the unit number (e.g. sb600sata.device:0) gives a number of interesting values, among them Spin_Up_Time, Power_On_Hours, Power_Cycle_Count, Head_Flying_Hours, Total_LBAs_Written, and Total_LBAs_Read.
The Total_LBAs_Written and Total_LBAs_Read attributes look like 'odometer' information I'm missing but my disk doesn't seem to support those attributes. I get a lot of SMART information but not those.
zzd10h wrote:Or use SMARTDock docky from the AmiOuest team to monitor your hard drive
Thanks zzd10h! I'll see what information SMARTDock docky can give me.
- Janne Peräaho
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