Hard Disk Monitoring

The power off retract cycle count has increased by 2 on one of my drives in the span of a week despite the absence of any discernible problems.

The disk in question is an external desktop 4TB Western Digital Easystore (which is basically just a rebranded MyBook), and I cannot come up with a reasonable explanation as to why it's suddenly having this problem. I've had the drive since February and it's never so much as had a hiccup - the power off retract cycle count is basically the only indication that anything weird has even happened.

I don't really use the drive all that often - I'd estimate that it's only on about an hour a day (give or take) while I'm copying some files to it. It never crashes suddenly, it doesn't restart, I don't get any error messages, and the transfer completes without a single hitch. As I said, there's basically no indication that anything's awry.

When I'm done with everything, I always make sure to safely disconnect the drive before removing it entirely and I've never had a problem with that step either. That's basically all the action this drive ever sees.

Is it possible that safely removing the drive sometimes increases the power off retract cycle count? Could it be a bug of some kind? I ask because I remember a discussion on WD's forum about a 5TB MyBook throwing out warnings about emergency retracts every time it was safely removed or even put to sleep. The only reason I haven't asked them about it is because they eventually starting ignoring the user who started that particular thread after failing to come up with an explanation. I don't imagine I'd have more luck with WD's team.

Anyway, I apologize for going on too long, but I'm just concerned. I've had some drives in the past with the same power off retract cycle issues (two 4TB WD Desktop Elements and another 4TB Easystore), but those eventually stopped and they're still working fine today. I use all of my drives in basically the same way and for the same reasons, so I'm just wondering if there's something I'm missing here.

Thank you so much for your time.

I completely understand that you worry, personally I'd feel the same.

Did not yet experience similar with external disks, especially if they're safely removed.
But experienced similar with internal disks many times: the "power off retract cycle count" increased every time when the computer (properly!) powered down or even restarted.

In that case we found that the problem is related to the chipset driver which does not properly manage power and every time the system started the shut down procedure, the drive increased that counter (probably lost power "too soon" or similar).
There updating the driver of the disk controller (motherboard chipset) helped.

If I'm correct, your drive is used with USB connection?
Personally I'd try to verify
- if the drive is connected to completely different USB controller. For example, if you use with USB 3.0 now, I'd try to check on USB 2.0
- the drive with a completely different motherboard/chipset
- if there may be an updated driver for the USB controller you use

as then you can examine which combination(s) are causing the problems.

Maybe you can verify if the issue is related to power management. If the "Advanced Power Management" function is supported by the disk drive (that option is available in Hard Disk Sentinel in the Disk menu, not greyed out) then I'd try to set it to "Maximum performance and power consuption (254)" level by dragging the slider to right. That helped many times against such weird issues related to power management - and may help now too.

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly.

Yes, the external drive is connected with a USB cable but it has it's own power adapter so I'm wondering whether or not that's a factor that should be considered. Anyway, I'm going to run through everything you suggested and try that so hopefully something will work.

I ran an extended scan on the drive to be sure that nothing was corrupted and everything came out just fine. Which leads me to my next question: could data corruption occur with this kind of problem? Or is the issue purely mechanical? As I said, everything with the drive works perfectly fine - I wouldn't even know there was a problem if not for the slowly increasing retract count. It does what it's supposed to, and it shuts down perfectly fine: it isn't until I check out the retract count that I even know something's up.

It's just so weird - I've never noticed the drive lagging, crashing, resetting, it's never so much as even slowed down. It's like the only thing I can narrow it down to is shutting it down.

One last question, if I may - how high of a retract count is too many? I'm aware that it should ideally be zero, but at what count does the lifespan of the drive become seriously compromised? And HOW compromised? I know it's incredibly difficult to guess these things, but are we talking months or years?

Anyway, thanks so much for your help!