Hard Drive Load/Unload Cycles - Is it still a thing? - HGST 7K1000

Hi,

I have an Hitachi 7K1000 on my laptop for about one month - 19 days Power On Time - and the SMART value for Load/Unload Cycles already increased to almost 14,000. In another computer I have a WD7500BPKX since 2015 - 600 days powered on - which has about 300,000 Load/Unload Cycles.

For the past two days, I have been tweaking the APM value with CrystalDiskInfo - from default 80h to A0h - and this makes the cycles increase significantly slower and the hard drive does less click noises, it is as quiet as the WD.

So, I have been reading on the subject, especially the WD Green debacle - where they have the inactivity timeout set to 8 seconds (regular drives have something sane like 120 or 240 seconds as far as I know) - and looks like those cycles are one of the main reasons for failures.

I tried setting this value permanently with software such as HDAT2 or Hitachi Feature Tool, however none of those tools run properly on my laptop. Guessing Legacy is not truly legacy anymore...

Tomorrow I'll get my hands on an old laptop, place the drive there and see if I can write the APM value permanently so I don't have to run software on windows for this all the time.

I am looking forward any inputs of anymore that has more opinions or knowledge about this.

Thank You.

Regards,
Jorge M. Silva

PS: Both the 7K1000 and WD7500BPKX are rated for 600,000 cycles.

Edit: I did the tweak with Hitachi Feature Tool 2.17 ( Available at files.hddguru.com/download/Software/HITACHI%20DRIVE%20FEATURE%20TOOL/ ) on an old Acer laptop, the setting is now permanently written on the drive.