I bought a WD Green Caviar for my new computer. I choose the green line because of its low noise level. But I am no longer sure that it was a good choice. Yes, the drive is really silent and it is fast enough for me. But I had two strange system crashes during the last 3 weeks ( with my old computer I had no system crash in 7 years!) where the kernel reported I/O errors during disk operations - after a reboot everything was fine again. I did a file system check and SMART self test with no errors found. There are similar reports in this forum which make me belief that the Green Caviar is responsible for these crashes.
But today I discovered something else that worries me. I had a look at the SMART data and I discovered a very high Load Cycle Count for this 1,5 month of operation. Here is the output of smartctl:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 132
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 514
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 131
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 189 189 000 Old_age Always - 35870
As you can see the drive has already gone through 6% of the permitted load cycles. The drive in my old computer had only ~1360 load cycles in three years .
Somebody told me these numbers are meaningless, but I am not so sure. What do you think?
