Life span of HDD - maximum reads/writes etc Post: 302378386

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Special Forums Hardware Filesystems, Disks and Memory Life span of HDD - maximum reads/writes etc Post 302378386 by Azhrei on Monday 7th of December 2009 07:05:54 PM

12-07-2009

Registered User

From an engineering standpoint, yes. It would have to.

Most of the MTBF rates are based on some standard percentage of use, such as 30%. If you are keeping the drive busier than that, then you can expect the lifetime to be decreased.

Heavy usage over a long period is more likely to result in a thermal failure than anything else. The magnetic surface is good for X number of write operations and the servo motors are good for X number of direction reverses and distance traveled.

I would suggest that you have multiple spare drives ready to go (most shops will do this just out of a need for short-as-possible downtime). You could of course use some form of RAID that spreads the usage out over multiple drives. Using a form of RAID that provides redundancy also means that a drive failure doesn't immediately impact your uptime too.

Another option is to use rsync or similar technology that only copies the new files or those parts of the files that have changed, reducing the number of overall writes to the drive. The problem with rsync is that it has to read the file first and calculate block checksums which will have an impact on the overall access to the drives if they are configured for concurrent use.

Azhrei

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LEARN ABOUT CENTOS

approx-gc

APPROX-GC(8)						      System Manager's Manual						      APPROX-GC(8)

NAME

       approx-gc - garbage-collect the cache of Debian archive files

SYNOPSIS

       approx-gc [OPTION]...

DESCRIPTION

       approx-gc  scans  the  cache created by approx(8) and finds files that are corrupted or no longer needed.  With no options specified, these
       files are listed on standard output and removed from the cache.

       A corrupted file is one whose size or checksum does not match the value specified in the Packages or Sources file.

       An unneeded file is one that is not referenced from any distribution's Packages or Sources file.

       approx-gc may take several minutes to finish.

OPTIONS

       -c file, --config file
	      Specify an additional configuration file.  May be used multiple times.

       -f, --fast
	      Don't perform checksum validation.

       -k, --keep, -s, --simulate
	      Don't remove files from the cache.

       -q, --quiet
	      Don't print file names.

       -v, --verbose
	      Print the reason for removal of each file.

EXAMPLES

       To remove all unneeded or corrupted files from the cache:

	      approx-gc --quiet

       This is run as a weekly cron(8) job.

       To list the files that would be removed from the cache, without actually doing so:

	      approx-gc --keep

FILES

       /etc/approx/approx.conf
	      Configuration file for approx and related programs.

       /var/cache/approx
	      Default cache directory for archive files.

SEE ALSO

       approx.conf(5), approx(8), cron(8)

AUTHOR

       Eric Cooper <ecc@cmu.edu>

								     May 2011							      APPROX-GC(8)