Shame on WD - Absurd Load Cycle Count

My Western Digital Caviar green drive is about 8 months old (5889 hours Power On Time) and has a Load Cycle Count of 344,315. This can be seen using HD Tune. Per my calculations it’s been parking and unparking about once every 60 seconds on average. This is absurd. I’m counting on this as a backup drive, but how much longer can I expect this thing to last before it loses my family photos?

I’m using Windows BTW. And as a software engineer, it’s my opinion that WD’s statement about this problem affecting primarily Unix users or whatever is a big load of [delete].

[delete]

There is a couple of ways you can go on this.  One, modify your system so that it’s not indexing the drive.  This will prevent the OS from hitting the drive so that it keeps loading and unloading.  The other is to use our utility which will allow you to slow down the load/unload cycles.  For more information look at the links below.

http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3263

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=609&sid=113&lang=en