High Load Cycle Count an issue?

[Vladdie]

I am concerned about my Caviar Green drives that I bought, one 3TB CG is already up to 265,000 load cycles after 123 days (HD Sentinel image from yesterday) of being powered on (this is only used as a backup drive so is almost always idling 24/7). I heard a safe amount of load cycle counts was 300,000 and this will reach that in no time!

I recently returned a 3TB Seagate Barracuda drive because of a related issue when the head parked the drive would make an obnoxiously loud chirping noise that did not sound healthy at all. Investigating that issue is how I came across the APM and load cycle count issue so decided to look in to my other drives.

Last week I purchased a 2tb Caviar Green to replace my 2TB Samsung Spinpoint (which does not have this high load cycle count issue) when it fills up over the next couple of months. Since I installed it on Saturday it is already up to 6,000 load cycles (it has just been idling).

I was hoping if the OCUK community could advise me if this is actually an issue I should be worrying about or if it really doesn't matter and the drives can go on for a long while.

Cheers.

 

[jwsg]

It was mentioned when I got my Synology NAS. I connected the drive to a PC SATA ran a little downloaded utiliy which changed a timeout IIRC and sorted. But for a Windows PC rather than embedded Linux based NAS I didn't think this was a probelm?

 

[wonko]

Hi Vladdie, there's a long thread you might want to read here http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18338177

I read that WD has said that the drives are rated as good for at least 1M LCC, so no need to panic but I'd agree that your LCC is increasing at a rate I'd want to do something about.

Best option would be to stop whatever is accessing the disk so frequently so it wasn't parking and unparking the heads so often. If sums are right, 265K over 123 days is on average one LCC every 40 seconds which doesn't sound right for an idling backup drive. The recent rate shown on the screenshot isn't this high though. Could it possibly be HD Sentinal 'polling' the drive frequently to check it's health/SMART status? There would be a certain irony if it was .

If you can't sort out the cause, choices are to either live with it (and accept possible reliability issue) or try using WDIDLE3 to set the timeout value. Last time I looked the WDIDLE3 tool wasn't officially supported on the green drives so don't know what it would do to your disk or warranty.

 

[Vladdie]

Thanks guys.

wonko cheers for the useful thread and your advice. I think I will get the 3TB drive filled up over the next few months then put it in storage so I don't have to worry about the ever increasing load cycle count. In a couple of months the 2TB drive will be in use for downloads storage constantly for up to a year so I'll just have to hope that is okay (with it being used most of the time the cycle count shouldn't be as high anyway if I am understanding that right).

I think you are on to something about HD sentinel slowing down the cycle count, the lower rate syncs up with exactly when I started using HD Sentinel to check the health of the chirping Seagate Barracuda that I returned.

Makes me wish I just bought another Samsung Spinpoint which does not have this issue (only at 612 load cycle count after 266 days) and it was £20 cheaper than the WD. I only went with WD because my first Samsung Spinpoint failed after 6 months of use (one I am using now is a replacement from RMAing it).