Load Cycle Count

I've recently installed a new 500GB WD Scorpio Blue HDD in my Macbook. I've heard that something can go wrong with 'Load Cycle Counts', but I have no idea how to tell if I have this problem or not. According to SMART Utility, I've gone through 1240 load cycles in 18 power-on hours. That's around about 68 cycles per hour. Is that a lot? And if so, how do I stop it?

I can't speak to whether that's abnormally high (though I suspect it is), but I was able to reduce my 640GB WD Scorpio Blue from around 174 load cycles per hour to less than one by following this guide:
http://mymacfixes.blogspot.com/2009/06/how-do-i-stop-clicking-noise-from-hard.ht ml
It took me only a few minutes to fix the problem, and the overall improvement in system performance is incredible. I wish I'd come across this sooner!

Similar Messages

New HD load cycle count

I just installed a Hitachi 7K500 in my mid o9 and it is working great; no noise, no heat or excess vibration. I am a little in the dark about the load cycle count, I am getting around 214 cycles in the first hour and this seems a bit high. Should I be thinking about installing hdapm to lower my count? Just what is considered a good load cycle count for an hour? Again I'm very happy with the noise level as I do not notice any difference from the 5400.

Hi, jmsy. Paying attention to your hard drive's load cycle count is something you absolutely, positively don't need to do. It's like counting the number of times the wheels on your car turn. Sure, there's a relationship there between usage and lifespan. But you're going to use the car as much as you have to, and replace its tires and the car itself when necessary, and you'll know when those things are necessary without counting tire revolutions all along the way.
Back up your hard drive, keep the backup(s) up to date, and replace the drive when it fails (or, perhaps more likely, when your storage needs outgrow it). Forget about load cycles.

Hitachi 7K750 Power Settings and Load Cycle Count

Hello All-
I installed a 500GB Hitachi Travelstar 7K750 on Friday. I have set it up with both a Mac OSX 10.6.8 partition and with a Windows 7 Professional SP1 partition. The system is a 2010 MacBook Pro 15in.
As of now the "load cycle count" acorrding to SMART Utility is 1614 with 29 power on hours. This seems quite high given the amount of time it has been in use. From what I have read the power settings could be to blame. I have tried to use hdapm but it is not compatible with this drive. Any ideas of what I could try to stop it from increasing at this rate?
-Thanks

Count of load/unload cycles into head landing zone position.[16]�vThe typical lifetime rating for laptop (2.5-in) hard drives is 300,000 to 600,000 load cycles.[17] Some laptop drives are programmed to unload the heads whenever there has not been any activity for about five seconds.[18] Many Linux installations write to the file system a few times a minute in the background.[19] As a result, there may be 100 or more load cycles per hour, and the load cycle rating may be exceeded in less than a year.[20]
You can visit here for full information on SMART data.

Finding out hard drive load cycle count

How can you find out the load cycle count of your hard drive? Is there a program that you must download?

For reference, Hitachi's note on the subject
http://tinyurl.com/mcx6t
(above takes you to, for those where the long URL displays properly http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/9076679E3EE4003E86256FAB0058 25FB/$file/LoadUnloadwhite_paperFINAL.pdf)
One thing I did not know, but got from that article:
"Parking the heads on the ramp, or “unloading” the heads,
became the foundation of advanced power management
modes including Active Idle, Performance Idle and Low
Power Idle, implemented under Enhanced Adaptive Battery
Life Extender™ (Enhanced ABLE). Usage of Enhanced
ABLE can provide as much as a 20 percent reduction in
power consumption at the drive level."
So, disabling HD sleep should reduce load cycles, I'd guess, at the expense of draining the battery quicker.

I just bought MacBook Pro 13'' for 1 week, and load cycle is 11. How could I slow down the load cycle count?

The question is that, Could anyone tell me how to slow down load cycle count?

"Apple does not recommend leaving your portable plugged in all the time. An ideal use would be a commuter who uses her notebook on the train, then plugs it in at the office to charge. This keeps the battery juices flowing."
Could you please explain me this?
I also want to ask another question is: " Is it good if I charge to 100%, then drain battery to 80%, then plug-in charger again"?

Load Cycle Count over 7500 in just 5 days on new DV4 series notebook

Hi,
I'm really concerned about my new laptop i bought just a week ago (dv4-4172); it happens that the disk is making a lot of noise just like the infamous 'clicking sound of death' and reporting up to now, more than 7500 load cycles in just 5 days of operation and also, 2 errors in the CRC of the UDMA. Since my hard disk (Hitachi HTS547564A9E384 640.1 GB) was behaving like that i ran several test on the disk (HP's BIOS run-tests, HDD Tune, smartctl (short and the long one), etc.) but i'm not getting a single read-write error, that is, the system hasn't any functional/operational problem, yet. Furthermore, my disk's lifespan is 600000 load cycles and i'm getting about 1500 in just a day, you don't even need a calculator to realize the harddisk won't last more than 1.5 years. The constant clicking of the disk is also getting on my nerves too .
The question here is, is it normal for this hard disk to have an average count of 1500 load/unload in a day (i.e. 1 cycle every minute) or is my disk the only one with suicidal attitudes?. My last notebook's harddisk (Seagate) didn't get more than 100k cycles in 2 years of operation, that's why i'm concerned...
Naturally, hdparm solves the issue, but (partially or permanently) disabling my harddisk's APM is even more suicidal than my disk's actual attitude, and by the way, you need some technical skillset to change those values (I'm a linux sysadmin, so i knew how to solve that specific issue), why is the default configuration set as this? or is HP expecting every single user to know how to modify the APM or, if you don't, to have a seat while watching your hard disk self destruction take place.
Thanks in advance.
- melvin
FYI, the problem is agnostic of which operating system i use, even in the POST stage the harddisk starts with that annoying clicking (and its corresponding cycle count increased), and yeah, i've updated all my drivers and followed every suggestion hp support assistant gave to me, like the nice guy i am.
This question was solved.
View Solution.

Hello uncle_sam,
You’re having a problem with the hard drive.
The drive is not supposed to be making any noise.
Since the unit is still new I’d call HP and have them send you a new HDD.
Here is a link to the phone number.
Clicking the White Kudos star on the left is a way to say Thanks!
Let me know how everything goes.
Have a good day.

Load Cycle Count and Hard Drive Life

When I heard about issues with another platforms default power-management settings burning the life out of notebook hardrives, I decided it would be wise to check how my own MacBook Pro was doing. I installed smartctl utilities via Darwin ports and started keeping track to my drive status.
I was shocked to find that the LoadCycleCount as reported by my machine's SMART subsystem was over 500,000 of an expected 600,000 cycles in a harddrive typical life on a system that was just 18 months old of just typical use. Since then I've monitored things and haven't been able to get it to slow down - so that it's now crossed 613,000 after 8032 power-on hours and the macbook is still running - not making any weird drive noises either.
I've been making weekly backups now - but I'd still rather have a planned replacement than get caught in the middle with a downed system. Frankly, I'm bothered by how fast this drive's life has been "used up" by the default settings of OSX. Have people ever gotten a pro-active replacement approve by applecare - I have the extended warranty on my machine - but don't want to void my warranty on the whole machine just to fix this harddrive issue.

1. Yes.
2. I have used 254 for years on my HP. I don't run for extended periods on batteries, and I hate spin down / spin up delays. I have never had a problem and always use it sitting on my lap, often being set down on and picked up from a desk. I would not worry about it.

7000+ load cycles on my hard drive in one week

It seems awfully excessive to have such a high load cycle count on my computer I only bought seven days ago. This would mean my hard drive would be expected to last two years (600,000 load cycles).
I've installed hdapm and set the load cycles to 200, but I'm concerned as to the impact this would have on my hard drive. Has there been a firmware patch to fix this issue or should I just deal with the crippled power vs. shortened life on my hard drive?

Many people have reported similar problem.
It is discussed within "Topic : Western Digital Scorpio Blue 640 Drive draws too much power in a MacBookPro" (http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2250690&start=60&tstart=0). Currently at 14 pages and 205 replies.
I did find this reference back to that Topic on "My Mac Fixes" (http://mymacfixes.blogspot.com/2009/06/how-do-i-stop-clicking-noise-from-hard.ht ml):
A quick follow-up: I applied the firmware change suggested by Brian May on page 5 of this thread http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2250690&start=60&tstart=0 and after a couple of hours my Load Cycle count hasn't gone up by a single number (it was 11967 after 117 hours, and now I'm at 119 hours and no change).
I'm hoping this is the end of the problem, and I can just enjoy my hard drive and all that glorious storage now.
So, it might be a good place to start.

Load Cycles

What is a normal load cycle count? I ran S.M.A.R.T utility and found my hard drive has had 2303 load cycles in just 31 hours.
Thank you

Count of load/unload cycles into head landing zone position.[15]
The typical lifetime rating for laptop (2.5-in) hard drives is 300,000 to 600,000 load cycles.[16] Some laptop drives are programmed to unload the heads whenever there has not been any activity for about five seconds.[17] Many Linux installations write to the file system a few times a minute in the background.[18] As a result, there may be 100 or more load cycles per hour, and the load cycle rating may be exceeded in less than a year.[19]

New HDD Load / Unload Cycle Count increasing extremely fast !

Hi all
I just upgrade my Pavilion dv5 HDD. The new model is Hitachi Travelstar 7K500 (HTS725050A9A364). However, I found my new HDD's Load / Unload Cycle Count increasing extremely fast!
Until now the number of Load / Unload Cycle is 12,127. However, the new HDD only power on 137hours. (About 1 week of my use.) The data below is my new HDD's SMART data (by EVEREST 5.50):
ID
01   Raw Read Error Rate   62   100   100   0
02   Throughput Performance   40   100   100   0
03   Spinup Time   33   159   159   2
04   Start/Stop Count   0   100   100   14
05   Reallocated Sector Count   5   100   100   0
07   Seek Error Rate   67   100   100   0
08   Seek Time Performance   40   100   100   0
09   Power-On Time Count   0   100   100   137
0A   Spinup Retry Count   60   100   100   0
0C   Power Cycle Count   0   100   100   14
BF   Mechanical Shock   0   100   100   0
C0   Power-Off Retract Count   0   100   100   1
C1   Load/Unload Cycle Count   0   99   99   12127
C2   Temperature   0   152   152   19, 36
C4   Reallocation Event Count   0   100   100   0
C5   Current Pending Sector Count   0   100   100   0
C6   Offline Uncorrectable Sector Count   0   100   100   0
C7   Ultra ATA CRC Error Rate   0   200   200   0
DF   Load/Unload Retry Count   0   100   100   0
I'm pretty sure that the data is correct, because I can hear the HDD's Load / Unload sound very frequently. The C1 row increase about 2,000 per day. However my previous Hitachi 5K320 has no problem. The running operating system are both Windows 7.
I'm so worry about this. As you know, laptop HDD's L / UL Cycle is designed at 600,000. If my HDD continue increasing like this, it will reach this number in a very short time. Any one can help me?

It's a feature of modern 2.5" harddisks , the disk parks the head when its been inactive for a while, to avoid damage , uses less power , and reduces the heat etc gives the harddisk a better looking spec sheet , its meant to park its head after being inactive for a long time around an hour with proper management from the bios/os of the head parking feature, because there is nothing to manage this feature in hp's bios or os the disk parks the head about every minute for no reason then after 1 second the head goes back on the disk thats 1 load/unload cycle , it also effects performance as the head has to find its place back on the disk , load times will decrease by alot , videos will stutter the first few secs, i have the same problem but not as bad after 130 hours i had a count of around 1,250 load/unloads , different brands of disk have different idle timers plus i use utorrent which stops the harddisk from idling so much, there are a couple of solutions, you can find a tool to update/mod the harddisk firmware to increase the idle timer ( i decided against this as you can permently brake the harddrive and void the warrenty) , contact hp and request a bios update with proper management or the harddisk head parking feature i.e tell the harddisk it is idle after an hour, the temperary solutions are download hd tune and run it all the time this stops the harddisk from parking its head as it doesn't let it go idle , or the solution i am using at the moment download a programme called HDD scan , everytime you turn on/off you have to run the prog go to tasks/features/ide features set the advance power management from its default value to 254 then press set, no more unnessary load/unloads, downside is the disk runs a couple of 0c hotter mine still never goes above 40c even under full load thanks to a active cooling pad, also its less well protected against shock.

T400s Hard Drive Clicking - Load/unload cycle count SMART Attribute decreasing very quickly

Hi,
I get a T400s 2808 CVG. I degrade to XP Pro SP3.
The Hard-drive is Toshiba MK2529CSG.
I experience Hardrive clicking (or ticking) when the hard drive is idle. Forcing the drive to be busy silences the ticking sound.
On the other hand I get the issue that "Load unload cycle count" SMART attribute is decreasing very quickly. I loose 1 point each 4 or 5 days.
I also make a little test to check the correlation between the reported number of load unload cycle count and the ticking sound.
Postive. Each time I hear the tick, each time the SMART attribute report one more Load/unload cycle count.
Any one get the same issue?
Any solution?
I already see and read http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_hard_drive_clicking
Thanks and regards,
Patrick

any harddisk that make any unusual mechanical noises probably means the the harddisk will die soon
T400s - 2815RW1 + Win7 Ultimate
Don't pm me for help! That's what the forum is for. Also, Google's nicer than me. Ask him.

Cycle Counts - Manually schedule by From and To Locator

We run Cycle Counts for a range of stock locators. However, when manually scheduling a Cycle Count, the only option is to enter locators one by one. So, if one subinventory has 300 stock locators and we'd like to count only 200 of them, we'd have to enter each locator. We are finding this very impractical. Hoping someone has come across this and thought of something innovative - as we can only think of using Dataload to load the locators.

Hi,
I think the solution for your question can be solved using the ABC compiles, ABC assignment groups. Just check the topics once.
Regards,
veeraiah chowdary.B

Cycle Counts, import and use

I see that when importing to the oItems destination via DTW, it is possible to bring in Cycle Count info. There is no sample or template CycleCount sheet, so what I know I gleaned just from looking at the mappable fields in DTW.
Can anyone give me some tips about importing and using Cycle Counts? I confess I find updating any destination via DTW to be a real chore, frequently more work that it is worth.
In this instance I already have items and warehouses and prices and quantities on hand. All I would want to do is import Cycle Count fields. So in DTW would this be considered an update (of existing items) or an import (just of cycle counts)? Since I don't want to change anything for the items, warehouses, or prices, what would be the least amount of data I'd have to show for the already ready loaded areas to get the cycle counts in?
TIA.

By Cycle Counts If you talking about importing prices and quantities
You need to use DTW template StockTaking template inside folder oStockTaking.
Here you will enter ItemCode WH and Quantity
the Prices will be imported using the ItemPrices template in the oItems folder as an Update with the Item main template.
then you will through the Inventory > Inventory Trans > Initial Quantity Reconcile the Quantities imported
Suda

Perform Full Cycle Count - No Data Found

I am trying to initialize a full cycle count for all items in a subinventory. I have a recent ABC compile set and a new cycle count setup. A, B, C and D classes are all set to count 1x per year. I have verified that all items from the compile are no in the cycle count. I submitted a "Cycle Count Scheduler" request and ensured that it completed. I then set all the parameters in the "Perform Full Cycle Count" request and set to save to file. After it completes and I view the output, the file says "No data found". My only recourse is to dump all items from Material workbench and use Data Load to enter them in ( a bit tedious for 900+ items). Is there anything I need to be doing different?

You mention that you have done the ABC setups.
But in Cycle count setups, have you defined a cycle count schedule?
And more importantly, in cycle count classes, have you entered the frequency at which each class should be counted?
Last but not the least, what is the last count date (on the serial and schedule tab)?
If it is today, you will have to wait till tomorrow.
Hope this helps,
Sandeep Gandhi

Cycle count Storage location selection

Hi,
Could someone explain to how the Storage locations are selected when I run transaction MICN.
Our settings in config are like this
I have a material in one storage location, it has never been counted. I run the transaction MICN for that material in my plant with today's date nothing is returned. I change the date to one year in the future and the system returns many locations including the one the material is in. I can comprehend that because the count date is empty in the mard table, I have to enter a future date but why do I get many location where the material is not even stored in?
By the way as we only want to count all our items once per year, they have all been set with the letter D in the material master.
Kind Regards
Thierry

Where do you see the advantage of cycle counting if all your materials are classified with D?
In that case you can just use MI31 and do annual inventory.
If you have no last count date, then SAP uses the creation date if the accounting view.
Which is for all materials equal if you loaded them before go-live.
And the storage location is coming from MARD table, all locations for which your material was created. And because you did not activate the box to exclude the materials with zero stock.

Load Cycle Count

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for