Why is my hard drive cycle count increasing so fast?

Solution 1:

These values you got from man hdparm apply to -S option – spin-down, making platters stop rotating.

My quick research indicates that Load_Cycle_Count is connected to parking heads and it seems the -B option (Advanced Power Management, APM) is the right one. The description in the man page is not perfectly clear to me but your value of 128 is the most aggressive one that doesn't permit spin-down. My guess is it parks the heads most often.

You calculate a spin-down time from this value of 128 using the description of -S and I think it's wrong. This calculation confuses -B and -S. The same confusion occurs when you set APM to 241.

I've seen claims that hdparm -B 255 /dev/sdX helps. It disables Advanced Power Management though. My disk is set to 254 and it has what I think is a moderate Load_Cycle_Count with respect to Power_On_Hours: 200k and 20k respectively, so the ratio is way better than yours.

My advice is to use one of the following:

hdparm -B 127 /dev/sdX
hdparm -B 254 /dev/sdX
hdparm -B 255 /dev/sdX

I guess if you set -B to a value that permits spin-down (i.e 127 or less) then you should also adjust -S option to get not-too-short spin-down time. This is because every spin-down requires heads to be parked.

While man hdparm warns about various dangerous options, -B is not among them. Even if I'm completely wrong it should be safe to experiment.