Parking winchester heads on a laptop under FreeBSD

The problem that the Bolsheviks have been writing about for so long is not only in Ubuntu, but also in FreeBSD.

In short:

On some laptops (or with some hard drives), the operating system uses a very aggressive power saving mode. In this mode, there is a very frequent parking of heads of the hard drive, literally every few seconds. Winchesters have a limit on the number of parking lots and too frequent parking may exhaust this resource prematurely.
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To diagnose a problem, you will need a smartctl utility (sysutils / smartmontools in ports).

Run the command:

# smartctl -A / dev / ad4 | grep Load_Cycle

(change ad4 to your hard drive name)

The result will be something like the following:

193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0012 097 097 000 Old_age Always - 37606

The last number in this line is the number of parking lots. Run this command several times with a break of several seconds. If the number is growing - then the problem is on the face.

In FreeBSD, this problem is solved with the help of the ataidle utility (sysutils / ataidle in ports).

Run the command:

# ataidle -P 254 / dev / ad4

(change ad4 to your hard drive name)

The -P parameter controls the power of the hard drive. A value of 254 means maximum performance. In this mode, energy is not saved and heads do not park. Those interested can see the values ​​of other modes in man ataidle.

In order for this command to be executed automatically when loading, you need to add the following lines to the /etc/rc.conf file:

ataidle_enable = "YES"
ataidle_devices = "ad4"
ataidle_ad4 = "- P 254"

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