Thinkpad R61 Hard disk Load cycle count rapidly increasing

I noticed that the hard drive load cycle count on my new Thinkpad R61 is increasing very rapidly.
Under Vista, It increases about 68 / hour on AC and 72 / hour on Battery.

My hard disk is a Hitachi Travelstar 5K250 (Model: HTS542516K9SA00) that is rated for 600,000 load/unload cycles.

At this rate, this will give me 367 days of use (assuming 24 hours / day) or 2 to 2 1/2 years of use if I use the laptop around 10 - 12 hours a day, before the hard disk gives out.
(I understand this is approximate)

I would like to know if this is typical? or something wrong with my settings? How can I fix this?

I got the load / unload cycle count using smartmontools for windows.
http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

 

You can probably change the power settings on the drive using the Hitachi Feature Tool program.

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm?linkto=QL

 

Wow thanks for this information, guys. This definitely piques my interest and I'll have to test this out when I get home.

 

Thanks, I will try it out. But according to it's documentation ( http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/downloads/FTool_User_Guide_210.pdf), it says that

Also, I have setup this laptop to dual boot with Linux (Ubuntu), and in ubuntu, I tried running

Code:

sudo hdparm -B 200 /dev/sda

And after this the load cycle does not change at all. The hard drive temperature seems reasonable (43 Celcius). Not sure if anything else can go wrong due to this change.