In the past week the “power off retract cycle” count for two of my Easystore drives increased for no reason I can think of. I’ve never removed my external drives without properly ejecting them first, and I have not observed any other issues with the drives in question: I’ve never heard any sounds from my computer indicating that they’ve been randomly/accidentally disconnected from the USB ports, so I’m sure that’s not the reason for the seemingly out of nowhere upticks in “power off retract cycle”. I use different USB cables for each drive, and I use different ports for each drive.
And the really weird part is that I’m 99% sure that the retract cycle count increased right after I safely removed them from my PC, because it was first thing I noticed the next time they were connected. And these were two separate incidents a week apart, not the same day. It was the exact same conditions for both drives: safely ejected without a problem, but with an increase in the retract cycle count the next time they were connected to my PC. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the drives otherwise (they’re only a couple of months old), and nothing about my environment has changed or shifted that could account for the change in S.M.A.R.T. readings.
I don’t get it, are they somehow not powering down properly even after receiving the signal to do so from the computer? Is it a bug in WD’s firmware? Has anybody experienced something like this before?
