Question Load/unload cycle count suddenly rising fast

[sauzer]

Hello. So I'm kinda worried... this is the HDD on one of my pc (its a WD green caviar 2 years and half old):

Now what worries me is the load/unload cycle count that I've noticed is raising very quickly and I dont remember it being so high before. The HDD has been up for 18k hours, thats about 7 cycles per hour to reach 130k, yet i've been keeping an eye on it for the last hours and its raising at about 80/100 per hour. Thats way too high, with a 20 hours day use it'd be like 700k cycles in a year, I dont think WD even rates that drive for that much.

Anyone know what could be the problem here? I've changed nothing on that PC, it seems this behaviour just started lately, i dont have a smart picture of months ago so i cant compare but i really dont remember that value so high before. The only thing i can think of is that last jan i installed an SSD on that pc, could it be that that value increased slowly while i had windows10 on the HDD and started increasing a lot faster once I put the OS on the ssd?

Thanks a lot for the help!

 

[AllanGH]

Two detriments:

It's a WD green.
It's approaching 3 years in use.

You would do well to get rid of that drive fairly soon. I have never had a WD green make it to 3 years.

You may be seeing a drive that is on its way out.

 

[sauzer]

Two detriments:

It's a WD green.
It's approaching 3 years in use.

You would do well to get rid of that drive fairly soon. I have never had a WD green make it to 3 years.

You may be seeing a drive that is on its way out.

Honestly most of the HDs on my pcs are WD greens and I've never had a problem in 3 years, I'm lookin at another one now on another pc same model with 42k hours and it has 160k cycles.
But my question is, why suddenly the cycle value rising so fast? There must be a reason.

 

[sauzer]

Well, it seems i fixed it. With a DOS tool you can change the idle park time on WD greens from 8 seconds (default) to a max of 300 or even never.
When my HDd had the OS, the cycle value went up very slowly because the OS would always keep the HD in use, but when I installed the OS on the SSD the HD kept going on and off so the cycles skyrocketed. I guess a lot of people with an SSD and a green WD will see the green fail fairly quickly without using this tool since in a year the cycles can go even up to 500k if you have the pc almost always up, and WD rates it for 300k cycles only (altho it doesnt mean it'll break after 300k, but still its better if it doesnt go that high so fast).