HD Load Cycle (and eventual failure?)

[ypnos]

I stumbled across several ressources on the internet dealing with hard drive clicking sounds and load cycles. The deal is this: To save power / cool down, hard drives parks the head on idle (this is power saving step before spinning down). This behaviour is initialised by the BIOS, although it can be adjusted by the Operating System afterwards.

Problem is, the default setting on my machine seems to be quite aggressive, letting the drive do this several times a minute.

The "Load Cycle Count" describes how often the head was parked and put back on the medium. A regular hard drive is designed to withstand an amount of about 600,000. Regular usage of my Thinkpad for about 9 months already gives me a LC count of 379,872.

I'm quite concerned about the durability of the hard drive, as well as my data on it. My questions are:
Should I disable HD power saving on the OS level?
Could the drive take harm then because of temperature?
Why is this the default setting?


Johannes

[lead_org Microsoft MVP Contributor]

you can turn down the sensitivity in the Thinkvantage software regarding head parking. This feature is added to prevent the harddrive head crashing into the platter, since the density of data storage on new harddrive have experienced exponential growth, and the number of platters used have also increased. Therefore, fault tolerance have also decreased, the number of G shock it can experience during the harddrive spinning before catastrophic failure have also decreased. As there is only a couple of micrometer of space between the head and the spinning platter, so a sudden increase in G will cause head bump into it the spinning platter.

laptop harddrive nowadays is one of the most astonishing engineering marvel to come to the consumer market.... if you use a microscope to look at the surface of the platter, the smoothiness is comparable to the gyroscopes balls used in Hubble telescope.