I have a WD Caviar Green HDD (1T). It is normal to have Load Cycle Count about 172000 in only 6 months?
The OS is Ubuntu; the WD HDD is in raid with a Segate laptop HDD (500GB); the Segate Load Cycle Count is only 11511 in 6 months.
The values are reported by webmin SMART section. I tried to play with "Spin down hard disks when possible" from power management without success. The mini server is running about 7 hours per day.

That's a big number, but please have a look here.

The WD Green parks the head after 8 seconds of inactivity in order to conserve power. Linux tends to access the hard drives frequently for things like logging, which will cause the WD Green to "wake up" and load the head.

The result is that the WD Green used as a Linux system drive experiences very high rates of head loading, which COULD impact life expectancy. For this reason, I don't consider the WD Green to be a good candidate for a system drive, though I do use them as storage drives.

Solutions include a firmware update that lets you change the wait time before the head is parked, or making configuration changes to your Linux system that reduces its desire to write to the disk all the time. See, for instance, this article provided by WD.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you jiml8.
I am asking my self if the "people" from WsternDigital are aware about Linux existence. To me this is unacceptable!
I checked my WD HDD and it is not mentioned "Only for Windows".

You can also disable the timer (or set a large value) using a bootable
DOS diskette and the wdidle3 utility. This way you don't mess with
the firmware at all.
I did it on my WD10EARS some time ago. You can read my experience here.
http://lordkhelben.wordpress.com/201...idle-settings/

That IS the firmware update.

I found the solution:

Since I have important data on this raid architecture I will do the next:
1) Buy a Segate ST31000520AS.
2) Blame Western Digital on all the Forums.

May ST31000520AS have the same problem?

Before purchasing a seagate 2TB drive, you should research a bit. They put out at least one series that had a very high infant mortality rate. That might be all taken care of now but I am not sure.

I stooped the logs but "Load Cycle Count" value continuing to increase.

ps -ef|grep rsyslog
syslog 974 1 0 08:56 ? 00:00:00 rsyslogd -c4
root 2711 2672 0 08:58 pts/0 00:00:00 grep --color=auto rsyslog
/etc/init.d/rsyslog stop
Rather than invoking init scripts through /etc/init.d, use the service(8)
utility, e.g. service rsyslog stop

Since the script you are attempting to invoke has been converted to an
Upstart job, you may also use the stop(8) utility, e.g. stop rsyslog
rsyslog stop/waiting
ps -ef|grep rsyslog
root 2743 2672 0 08:58 pts/0 00:00:00 grep --color=auto rsyslog

Finally I stopped the logs:

chmod -x /usr/sbin/rsyslogd