Inspiron 1545. S.M.A.R.T. Load Cycle Count over 5million

[cam94z28]

I have an Inspirion 1545 with the Samsung HM250HI (250GB) hard drive.
I have tried several S.M.A.R.T. analysis programs, and none seem to think a Load Cycle Count of 5,579,205 at 3762 power-on hours is abnormal. That's an average of 1483 Load Cycles an hour. I did read on the acronis knowledge base that the acceptable range for a 2.5" hard drive should be no more than 600,000. Should I be looking to replace the drive?
HDTune still seems to show it performing OK.

HD Tune: SAMSUNG HM250HI Health

ID Current Worst ThresholdData Status
(01) Raw Read Error Rate 100 100 51 0 Ok
(02) Throughput Performance 252 252 0 0 Ok
(03) Spin Up Time 93 92 25 2390 Ok
(04) Start/Stop Count 99 99 0 1693 Ok
(05) Reallocated Sector Count 252 252 10 0 Ok
(07) Seek Error Rate 252 252 51 0 Ok
(08) Seek Time Performance 252 252 15 0 Ok
(09) Power On Hours Count 100 100 0 3762 Ok
(0A) Spin Retry Count 252 252 51 0 Ok
(0B) Calibration Retry Count 100 100 0 204 Ok
(0C) Power Cycle Count 99 99 0 1694 Ok
(0D) Soft Read Error Rate 100 100 0 0 Ok
(BF) G-sense Error Rate 100 100 0 371 Ok
(C0) Power Off Retract Count 252 252 0 0 Ok
(C1) Load Cycle Count 1 1 0 5579205 Ok
(C2) Temperature 58 48 0 917546 Ok
(C3) Hardware ECC Recovered 100 100 0 0 Ok
(C4) Reallocated Event Count 252 252 0 0 Ok
(C5) Current Pending Sector 252 252 0 0 Ok
(C6) Offline Uncorrectable 252 252 0 0 Ok
(C7) Ultra DMA CRC Error Count 200 200 0 0 Ok
(C8) Write Error Rate 100 100 0 2851 Ok
(F0) Head Flying Hours 100 100 0 3609 Ok
(F1) (unknown attribute) 96 94 0 6130512 Ok
(F2) (unknown attribute) 99 94 0 1806654 Ok

Power On Time : 3762
Health Status : Ok

[namaiki]

I'm just curious, but what does Hard Disk Sentinel say for your drive?

I've got a Samsung HN-M101MBB drive that I bought mid-August this year and it already reports 45,000 for Load Cycle Count, which seems to translate to 97% health for that statistic.

[cam94z28]

Originally Posted by namaiki

I'm just curious, but what does Hard Disk Sentinel say for your drive?

I've got a Samsung HN-M101MBB drive that I bought mid-August this year and it already reports 45,000 for Load Cycle Count, which seems to translate to 97% health for that statistic.

I will download it and take a look. Just out of curiosity, what are your power on hours for that drive?

[namaiki]

My drive is currently at 1,012 hours.

[cam94z28]

Your drive looks to be averaging about 44 Load Cycles per hour. A big difference compared to mine. You can see from the attachment how far mine increased from the time of my last post. It's actually up to 5,579,670 now. And that is DURING running a virus scan!?

Here is the S.M.A.R.T. data from Sentinel Beta. If you notice, the data for Load Cycle Count is listed as "always passing".

Also attached is the summary page.

[namaiki]

Maybe you can try change something in Disk-> Advanced Power Management.

At least your drive doesn't have any bad sectors... That load/unload count has got to be some sort of record.

[cam94z28]

Originally Posted by namaiki

Maybe you can try change something in Disk-> Advanced Power Management.

At least your drive doesn't have any bad sectors... That load/unload count has got to be some sort of record.

I would agree. Especially considering the drive isn't showing any immediate signs of failure. It started acting a little sluggish, which is why I checked SMART, but i think it was more likely due to disabling superfetch with only 3GB of RAM.

The interesting thing is, last night I used winaam to try disabling acoustic management and the counts stopped increasing until I shut down. But, the drive made a weird noise at power down, then started counting again after the next boot. According to sentinel APM was already disabled for the hard drive. I will play with the windows APM settings, though.

EDIT: Tried to enable APM through Sentinel and it returned "Error occured while sending the command. The disk controller or it's driver does not support this function." Under the status in Sentinel it says it's already disabled. I guess the drive doesn't support external power management.

BTW, It's up to 5,580,008 :P

The only thing I've changed recently is enabling ahci flag in the registry, and in bios. Windows wouldn't boot before when i tried enabling ahci in bios, without it enabled in windows. For that number to be that high, though, it had to have been increasing for a long time.

[cam94z28]

Just FYI, I think I'm going to replace the drive, just to be safe. I ran an HDtune benchmark earlier. With nothing else open in windows, it had quite a few major dips. Immediately after, S.M.A.R.T. showed the same number of additional Load Cycle Counts, as there were dips in the benchmark. It seems this drive is parking/unparking the heads whenever it sees fit. Even during active 80-100% disk utilization. Or, maybe it's trying to park the heads as normal, but can't complete it, so it tries over and over. I have no idea, but I think I will be replacing the drive as a precaution.

I have a 1TB Samsung F3 in my desktop that is absolutely flawless, and amazingly fast for a physical disk (150MB/sec peak reads/writes). I haven't had a single issue with it in 800 or so hours of use. Too bad I won't be able to say the same about this drive.

[cam94z28]

Originally Posted by cam94z28

Just FYI, I think I'm going to replace the drive, just to be safe. I ran an HDtune benchmark earlier. With nothing else open in windows, it had quite a few major dips. Immediately after, S.M.A.R.T. showed the same number of additional Load Cycle Counts, as there were dips in the benchmark. It seems this drive is parking/unparking the heads whenever it sees fit. Even during active 80-100% disk utilization. Or, maybe it's trying to park the heads as normal, but can't complete it, so it tries over and over. I have no idea, but I think I will be replacing the drive as a precaution.

I have a 1TB Samsung F3 in my desktop that is absolutely flawless, and amazingly fast for a physical disk (150MB/sec peak reads/writes). I haven't had a single issue with it in 800 or so hours of use. Too bad I won't be able to say the same about this drive.

I was about to buy a new drive today, but figured I'd give this one one last shot. It appears the drive is totally fine. It smoothed out after re-enabling superfetch. I guess it's a requirement with only 3GB of RAM. Load cycle counts continue to rise, and are up to 5,595,556. I've already backed everything up, and will do another surface scan once they top 6 million. Otherwise I won't worry about it.

I know I won't be buying WD any time soon though. My brother loaned me a 2.5" 320GB scorpio blue to try, which he said he used in his previous laptop for 2+ years. It had sat for a while before I used it. Didn't even make it to my first power on, the spindle was locked up.

Below are surface scan, and temp/speed graphs during the scan. Dark green are from using the desktop at the same time. Dips in the speed graph show during the same times.