Laptop hard drive lifetime (load cycles)

Run the following:

$ sudo smartctl -A /dev/sda | grep -P ‘Load_Cycle|ATTRIB’

And see something like this:

ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always – 6038

The last value is the number of load cycles. A laptop hard drive typically has a lifetime of 600,000 load cycles. If the count is increasing by several thousand per day (or even several hundred), it may be cause for concern.

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