S.M.A.R.T shows high Load_Cycle_Count | Why and how to prevent the number from increaseing?

Question

i just realized that some of my HDD's have a huge Load_Cycle_Count when reading out their S.M.A.R.T data. Some are short before failing and i am asking myself why this is the case and if there is anything i can do to prevent them from dying.

alex@ga-P55A-UD5:~$ sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdb
smartctl 6.5 2016-01-24 r4214 [x86_64-linux-4.4.0-142-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-16, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Western Digital Caviar Green (AF)
Device Model:     WDC WD10EARS-00Y5B1
[...]
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   090   090   000    Old_age   Always       -       10281
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   062   062   000    Old_age   Always       -       28456
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   001   001   000    Old_age   Always       -       611460

alex@ga-P55A-UD5:~$ sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdc
smartctl 6.5 2016-01-24 r4214 [x86_64-linux-4.4.0-142-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-16, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Western Digital Caviar Green
Device Model:     WDC WD6400AADS-00M2B0
[...]
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   093   093   000    Old_age   Always       -       7615
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   057   057   000    Old_age   Always       -       31743
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   053   053   000    Old_age   Always       -       442121

alex@silent-ssd:~$ sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdd
smartctl 6.5 2016-01-24 r4214 [x86_64-linux-4.4.0-142-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-16, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Western Digital Green
Device Model:     WDC WD20EARX-00PASB0
[...]
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x002f   200   200   051    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   098   098   000    Old_age   Always       -       2477
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   085   085   000    Old_age   Always       -       11176
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   181   181   000    Old_age   Always       -       59646

Answer 1

My findings so far:

The Cause

• Regarding to Western Digital and various websites 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 the high number in S.M.A.R.T Attribute 193 Load_Cycle_Count is related to a technique introduced by WesternDigital named Intellipark.
• Intellipark is implemented in some of their hard drive models, especially in their green series.
• It is designed to reduce power consumption if the drive is not beeing used.
• In some usecases, especially when combined with a Linux operating system, this intellipark-feature tends to shorten hdd's live.

Solutions

• Western Digital explains it's not their features fault, it's the bad configured operating system and they give some advices on how to properly configure linux.
• Western Digital also released a DOS tool to modify the intellipark-feature on some devices.
• For the Linux platform Christophe Bothamy released idle3-tools to modify that intellipark-feature - big thank you from my site.
• as mentioned in the comments below, hdparm -J does either modify the wd idle3 timer but as another commentary pointed out: This implementation is not as thorough as the official WDIDLE3.EXE

---

What I've done

Now I downloaded idle3ctl and turned off intellipark completely. Hopefully this will help to prevent the disks from failing quick. But anyway at least one disk is almost dead, regarding to S.M.A.R.T.

To disable the intellipark-feature i followed the idle3-tools instructions.

First I read out the idle3 timer value of this intellipark feature: sudo ./idle3ctl -g /dev/sdx

Than i disabled the timer sudo ./idle3ctl -d /dev/sdx

A power off/on cycle is necessary to take effect sudo hdparm -Y /dev/sdx

After that i rechecked the idle3 time and did the same after a reboot:

alex@silent-ssd:~/idle3tools/idle3-tools-0.9.1$ sudo ./idle3ctl -g /dev/sdd
Idle3 timer is disabled

Edit 2023

I just wanted to give an update about the state of the drives after 4 years of usage. All drives are still alive so far but the two disk with the Load Cycle Counts beyond 500.000 are not in use anymore, or at least only used from time to time for unimportant stuff. The third drive is still in active use. It hold the btc blockchain and is almost running 24/7 since four years now. The number of Load Cycle Counts only increased by a few thousands. For spin down I am using hd-idle with a timer of 3 hours that often times does not take effect because of the almost permanently updating blockchain.

Here is the smart data of that drive:

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Western Digital Green
Device Model:     WDC WD20EARX-00PASB0
[...]

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x002f   200   200   051    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   098   098   000    Old_age   Always       -       2713
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   046   046   000    Old_age   Always       -       40109
 193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   180   180   000    Old_age   Always       -       61955

As a side note to the topic about the lifespan of a HDD:

Thanks to this posting ( https://superuser.com/questions/197862/how-harmful-is-a-hard-disk-spin-cycle ) I found a nice paper / study ( https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/fast07/tech/full_papers/pinheiro/pinheiro_html/index.html ) about hard drives failures and their conclusion on how to interpret S.M.A.R.T values.

Answer 2

I have a 1TB WD Blue Mobile WD10SPZX with LCC rated endurance of 600k. It's was increasing fast too (about 7.7 cycles per hour):

coutinho@discovery:~$ sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdb
smartctl 6.6 2017-11-05 r4594 [x86_64-linux-4.19.0-13-amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-17, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model:     WDC WD10SPZX-75Z10T1
[...]
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       119
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   096   096   000    Old_age   Always       -       3040
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   193   193   000    Old_age   Always       -       23541

I tried both WD's WDIDLE3 DOS tool and idle3-tools, none worked with my disk.

Finally, I managed to reduce its LCC increase less than 1 per hour by setting APM value to 254 with hdparm adding the following lines to /etc/hdparm.conf:

/dev/sdb {
    apm           = 254
    spindown_time = 0
}

Answer 3

WD Green disks are designed to park the heads relatively quickly after the disk becomes idle. As a result you'll get a high load count.

An old article, but still pretty accurate, https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Western-Digital-Green-vs-Red-Hard-Drives-602/ writes

A load/unload cycle is when the disk spins up its platter to get ready for operation. Typically this happens when you turn on a system, resume from standby, or when the drive has been idle long enough for the OS to power down the drive. [..] the 300,000 cycles the Green drives are rated for is really quite a lot already. Even if you turn on/off your system or let it idle long enough to power down the drive 20 times a day, 365 days a year, a Green drive should still last for over 40 years.

Also

Head parking delay 8 seconds

In your case, your two disks have been powered on for 31743 hours and 11176 hours, respectively (approximately 3 years 6 months and 1 year 3 months, at 24x7). For that period of time the number of unload/load cycles really isn't unreasonable.

If you are running 24x7, mind, you should be using WD Reds instead of Greens.

Answer 4

Intellipark on newer WD drives cannot be switched off even with original WDIDLE3 utility.

As a workaround you can add to hourly cron this command

smartctl -t offline /dev/sdX

it prevents parks. Performance degradation is unnoticeable for me.

Answer 5

Adding to the discussion: I supervise a Synology NAS which has 5 drives, and is populated with WD Red 3TB drives

• Drives 1,2,3 and 5 have Power_On_Hours = 49760, +/- 2.
• Drive 4 has Power_On_Hours = 26959, as it replaced a failed drive at some point.

The replacement was one of the batch of 8 drives purchased originally, 5 installed, and 3 saved as replacements. So all drives are from the same time point, though bought from two different vendors to avoid getting all from one batch.

• Drives 1,3 and 5 have Load_Cycle_Count = 345 +/-2
• Drive 2 Load_Cycle_Count = 656
• Drive 4 (the one with only 27k hours) Load_Cycle_Count = 93144 !!

For what it's worth, I'm looking at the SMART data due to error warning emails about drive 2,

• Drive 2: Raw_Read_Error_Rate = 4520.
• Drives 1,3,5 Raw_Read_Error_Rate = 0
• Drive 4 (again the 27khr unit) Raw_Read_Error_Rate = 10232 !!

So for some reason, the one drive that was installed later than the rest has an enormous Load_Cycle_Count and Raw_Read_Error_Rate.

Not sure what to make of all that.