Stablebit Scanner's APM CAUSING high load cycle count

[hyjack]

My question is about why is Stablebit Scanners APM CAUSING high load cycle count.  I use both Stable Drivepool & Stablebit Scanner.  I have in the last year or so have had six Seagate 3 & 4 TB drives less than a year old go over the 300,000 load cycle count.  I discovered that this only happens when the Stablebit scanner Advance power manager is set (checked/ticked on) Maximum Performance.  When (unchecked/untick off) there is no increase or just one two at the most in over a time period of weeks.  I have to run APM unchecked, but when ever the computer is rebooted APM resets to default check/tick on and the high load cycle count starts again.  Does anyone know why this is occurring?  Also I have the bios (S.M.A.R.T.) disabled, but I have tried it both with the bios enable and disabled.  Info, my server is built with an Asrock Z87 Extreme 4 MB Intel core i7 CPU and 8 GB of ram.

Thanks in advance,

[Christopher (Drashna)]

All of the "Disk Control" settings are settings read (and configured via) the disk's firmware. 

 

StableBit Scanner just reads these, normally. But on some disks, you can configure them (but StableBit Scanner does not do so by default). 

 

As for what is going on... it's more or less a black box, and very much depends on the disk in question.

 

However, I suspect that what is going on here, is that the disk really isn't spinning down when it's idle, but it aggressively parks the heads when the disk is idle.  That way, there is no "spin up" time for accessing data, it just has to start moving the read/write heads into position (this is likely much quicker than actually spinning up the disks "to speed"). 

 

 

As for the SMART monitoring in the BIOS/Firmware, this has nothing to do with enabling the feature for the disks.  What it is doing though, is enabling notifications (such as halting the boot process if "Pre-failure" values have been triggered, or beeping if they are hit while the OS is running).