Few hours ago, I left my laptop of 7 years to make some food for about an hour. I was taking photos, so I knew the rough time that my laptop wasn’t attended to.

When I came back, I was at horror, because the harddrive was working really hard. My first guess was it’s doing swapping, the memory swapping task. I had such guess because I made my computer to download a big file to /tmp which was a tmpfs.

But I knew I have left enough free memory for the file to be saved without the needing of swapping, so I didn’t understand why and I actually couldn’t confirm because the screen couldn’t be turned back on, which made me 99% sure that it was really doing the swapping.

I had to force a shutdown and I’d never know what exactly happened.

An hour, my laptop might doing that for a full hour. It’s a 7-year-old laptop with a 7-year-old harddrive. I don’t know how long it still has ahead of it, but I haven’t had any harddisk issue. Nevertheless, after this, I honestly don’t know. It’s life might just have been chipped away for 1 hour.

I decided to try some harddrive health checking tool, so I found the smartmontools and:


$ sudo smartctl -i /dev/sda
smartctl 6.1 2013-03-16 r3800 [x86_64-linux-3.10.25-gentoo-1] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-13, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Fujitsu MHW BH
Device Model:     FUJITSU MHW2080BH
Serial Number:    ***REMOVED***
LU WWN Device Id: ***REMOVED***
Firmware Version: 00850012
User Capacity:    80,026,361,856 bytes [80.0 GB]
Sector Size:      512 bytes logical/physical
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   ATA8-ACS T13/1699-D revision 3b
SATA Version is:  SATA 2.5, 1.5 Gb/s
Local Time is:    Mon Jan 27 06:39:40 2014 CST
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

It seemed good to good for a quick short test:


$ sudo smartctl -t short /dev/sda
smartctl 6.1 2013-03-16 r3800 [x86_64-linux-3.10.25-gentoo-1] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-13, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF OFFLINE IMMEDIATE AND SELF-TEST SECTION ===
Sending command: "Execute SMART Short self-test routine immediately in off-line mode".
Drive command "Execute SMART Short self-test routine immediately in off-line mode" successful.
Testing has begun.
Please wait 2 minutes for test to complete.
Test will complete after Mon Jan 27 06:43:04 2014

Use smartctl -X to abort test.

It’s so interesting that the testing was running and I could still use my computer. After the said time, I ran:


$ sudo smartctl -H /dev/sda
smartctl 6.1 2013-03-16 r3800 [x86_64-linux-3.10.25-gentoo-1] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-13, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

“PASSED,” well, not sure if I would like this simple. I really did hope it would give me a number, but it’s a tool of few words, or single word in this case.

Frankly, I have been very careful, because I knew sooner or later, this harddrive would die on me. Everything has its time, this and the laptop will come to that. 7 years, that’s quite some record in these days and I surely hope it would keep going forever, but I know it’s not going to be like that.

By using tmpfs, I could reduce I/O on the physical disk, and the performance is a plus, that’s why I sometimes choose to download into memory directly, and I became more and more rely on it. I wish I have more memory, but with a laptop this old, that’s a fantasy, it’s already equipped at its maximal capacity.