Green Caviar: High Load Cycle Cout after short operation time

[psusi]

What if you make a background job to intentionally touch the disk every 6 seconds to prevent it from parking?  Or you can enable laptop mode to get the kernel to stop constantly flushing buffers it does not have to.  This is how you get a disk to stay spun down when you put it to sleep.  I’d say enable laptop mode and when you’re going away, manually tell the drive to sleep with hdparm -y.  That way it spins down and stays spun down, with no load/unload cycles while you aren’t around.