Hard Disk Monitoring

In the past couple of months, I've had three values increase dramatically:

4 Start/Stop Count
192 Power off Retract Cycle Count
193 Load/Unload Cycle Count

Not all the drives change all three values equally. For example, a 4TB HGST UltraStar has values of 26946, 26971 & 26971 respectively (this is for a drive with a power on time of only 84 days). While a WDC drive has values of 20459, 210, 20246 for the same three attributes (this drive has a power on time of 1868 days). The numbers generally increased from under 2000 in July of this year to over 20,000 in late August. HDS graphs show an obvious spike in these values over the last couple of months.

This is happening across multiple drives (both HGST & WD), and only to external drives (and not to the internal HDD on the laptop), so I am first suspecting one of two things (though only because I changed things around the time the values started to increase):

1) A port monitoring program (Zentimo) that has an option "Power off the device after device stopping" (which I think I enabled somewhat recently, I just disabled it today to see if the increase rate slows down).

2) I switched an external dock from USB 3 to eSATA (though I'm not sure why this would affect the values, again the timing of the increase is approximately around the time I changed the port).

Before I spend massive amounts of time trying to troubleshoot this, do I even need to worry about these values being so high? If so (and I discover some program is causing the values to increase), is this significantly shortening the possible lifespan of the affected drives?

Thanks in advance for any information/advice you can provide!

M'D

These values NOW are not yet critical, but if the increase continues, yes, I'd worry about the drives, frequent start/stop and load/unload can shorten the lifetime.
According specifications, most drives should be fine under 50000 start/stop count (this may be different, depending on the model).
Personally I try to keep these values as low as possible, preventing drives from too frequent start/stop cycles.

It seems the eSATA connection is causing the problem. I'm not sure if it's because of the eSATA card that I'm using, or the eSATA port on the dock. But switching to the dock's USB3 port, the load/unload increment went back to normal. Unfortunately, the HDD temps increased under the USB3 connector, a problem I have just brought up in a separate post.

Maybe this post can help:

https://www.hdsentinel.com/forum/viewto ... 222#p15748

which describes two ways:

1) Disk menu -> Advanced Power Management function
2) Configuration -> Disk control -> Do not allow spin down of disks option

designed to prevent load/unload and start/stop cycles in general.