Laptop HDD woes

I do quite a bit of international travelling and my old klunky Lenovo 3000N200 takes a few knocks and consequently I've had to purchase my 2nd HDD for this laptop in the past 3.5 years.


Last week my laptop hung for tens of seconds while logging in - and once more again today.  Looking at the kernel log I was able to see repeated time-outs on read errors which was a little alarming.   The palimpsest utility showed that I had a few bad sectors and there were a few pending to be remapped.   I had a quick look at the S.M.A.R.T. data using:

sudo smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sda

..and saw that I'd got 5311 hours of use out of the drive and considering I bought it about 400 days ago works out to be ~13.25 hours of usage per day on average.  Peeking at  /sys/fs/ext4/sda*/lifetime_write_kbytes it appeared I had written 1.4TB of data, which works out to be 0.27GB of writes per hour of use on average - which sounds fair as my laptop is mainly used for Web, Email and the occasional bit of compilation (as I do most kernel builds on large servers).

So what do I replace it with?  Well, being a cheapskate, I did not want to splash out on an expensive SSD on this relatively old laptop (which I will palm off to my kids fairly soon), so I went for an spinny disk upgrade.  My original drive was a 160GB 5400rpm WD1600BEVT - this time I spent an extra £5 and got a 2500GB 7200rpm WD2500BEKT with double the internal cache and improved read performance - the postage was free from dabs.com so double win.

Lost Circuits article on HDD data transfer rates.

Lost Circuits has written an in-depth article on hard disk media, covering aspects of HDD performance, such as transfer rates depending on the zone position (inner to outer diameters), discrepancies between internal transfer rates and benchmarked rates as well as the impact of track slew.

Some of the internal mechanical magic is also described, which helps explain how manufacturers configure their hardware and sector layouts to maximise performance. All very informative.

The website is slow, so be patient!

Bonnie++, a useful benchmarking tool

When it comes to figuring out how a file system behaves on a HDD or SSD I generally first turn to Bonnie++ as a straight forward and easy to use disk benchmarking tool.

Bonnie performs a series of tests, covering character and block read/write I/O, database style I/O operations as well as tests for multiple file creation/deletion and some random access I/O operations.

To install bonnie for Ubuntu, simply do:

sudo apt-get install bonnie

To get a fair I/O benchmark (without the memory cache interfering with results) Bonnie generates test files that are at least twice the size of the memory of your machine. This can be a problem if you have servers with a lot of memory as the generated files can be huge and testing can therefore take quite a while. I generally boot a system and specify ~1GB of memory using the mem=1024M kernel parameter just so that Bonnie only tests with a 2GB file to speed my testing up.

My rule of thumb is to run Bonnie at least 3 times and take an average of the results. If you see a large variation in your results double check that there isn't some service running that is interfering with the benchmarking.

Bonnie references:

http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++
http://linux.com/archive/feature/139742