excessive head parking on internal HDD

[Lumia925]

hello,
my Toshiba internal HDD developed bad sectors and slowed down to the point where i started feeling annoyed by the computers performance.
So I replaced it recently with a WD internal drive.
When I open HD Sentinel, it says the HDD's "load/unload cycle count" is over 10,000.
The HDD is just 2 months old, health and performance is 100%, and there are no reallocated sectors.
The old Toshiba drive too had very high load/unload cycles, i'm scared that that's what caused the bad blocks, although i'm not sure.
The only way I can stop this high load/unload cycles, is by disabling "HDD advanced power management" in HD Sentinel's options. Unfortunately, the drive doesn't "remember" this setting, and every time I turn the computer off, APM is turned on again.
My question:
Is this excessive load/unload cycle straining the drive? Will the drive develop problems if I don't disable APM every time I turn the computer on? Is there a way to make the drive or windows remember that I don't want APM turned on?

Specs:
Computer: HP ProBook.
HDD: WD Blue 5000LPVX 500GB internal notebook drive.
CPU: Intel Core i3 2310M.
RAM: 8GB DDR3.
OS: Windows 8.1 Pro x64.

 

[PizzaTheHutt]

You need to set the APm at startup each time, what you can try is WDidle3 to manually change the head park times on the hard drive permanently.

 

[Solandri]

This is a known issue with the WD green drives and WD blue Scorpio drives.

http://www.storagereview.com/how_to_stop_excessive_load_cycles_on_the_western_digital_2tb_caviar_green_wd20ears_with_wdidle3
http://forums.storagereview.com/index.php/topic/29253-newer-western-digital-hdd-head-parking-and-you/

There is debate about whether the aggressive head parking will cause excessive wear on the drives. It does cause the drives to lag whenever you try to access them after the head has been parked (which is almost always since it parks after a few seconds of inactivity by default.

 

[Lumia925]

Thanks both of you for taking the time to help me out. This was driving me nuts, i thought there was some problem with the computer's SATA controller!
Solandri, thanks for the links. My drive is indeed a WD blue Scorpio.
Followed the instructions in your first link and I was shocked to discover that the idle timeout was set at 8 seconds!
Ran "WDIDLE3 /D" from the Win98 boot USB key I made, and the parking problem has been solved.
I couldn't believe it, I had tried everything i could think of, choosing different SATA speeds from BIOS, updating the BIOS, updating intel rapid storage, changing power profile to "high performance", increasing "spin down" time in windows power options, nothing helped, other than having to repeatedly disable APM from HD Sentinel. But WDIDLE has finally resolved the issue for good. I shut down the computer completely, restarted, and although APM still shows up as "enabled" in HD Sentinel, the heads don't park, the frequent "click" noises are gone, and I have kept the computer powered on, mostly idle, for about 3 hours, load/unload cycle count hasn't gone up by even 1. Thanks indeed.
I'd recommend everyone with WD blue scorpio drives having problems with frequent clicks and excessive load/unload cycles to try out the solution in link 1 from Solandri. Made my day

 

[Lumia925]

Okay, another issue,
I have two Seagate Expansion HDDs connected to the laptop, using USB3, 1TB each, and they are parking the heads like a thousand times a day, just like my WD internal drive was doing before i did the wdidle3 thing.
Question, does Seagate offer a solution like the wdidle3? How do I make my Seagate drives behave like my WD internal drive and NOT park the heads a thousand times per day?
The clicks are annoying, access to the drives are slowed down when the heads need to unpark, the normalized value for Load/Unload cycle count has gone down from 100 to 99 in just one month, and although both drives are new, I really don't want to stress them unnecessarily and break them just because I have two valid warranties..