Reading about this old issue followed by something related on the ThinkPad I was curious to check the value on my R61… and the value retrieved was way too high: 450585. After just a few minute it increased to 450620 with a rate of about 3 cycles /minute! All these with the laptop on AC power and maximal performance settings. The S.M.A.R.T. reports 2718 power on hours and 347 power cycles. The laptop was bought end of March (more or less 200 days ago). If the drive is rated for 600k load cycles then (with the current settings) it will fail in at most 100 days. WOW! Less than a year lifetime! (the laptop has a 3 years warranty but this is just stupid).
For moment I applied the dirty workaround (running hdparm -B 254 at each startup should be enough as I’m not using suspend/hibernate - the KDE session resume features are enough for what I’m doing) and the count(down) has stopped. I’m not sure if this is related to Linux or to BIOS settings (had to reboot to check) but the settings are just normal for a computer used more as a desktop than a laptop (more performance vs. battery life). Is this a Lenovo default setting? I don’t know for moment but I’ll have to check the SMART on two other identical laptops bought at the same time but which run Windows not Linux. For more details please check also:
http://spicifer.blogspot.com/2007/12/about-loadcyclecount-issue.html
http://ubuntudemon.wordpress.com/2007/10/27/laptop-hardrive-killer-bug-is-worse-than-i-thought/
UPDATE: On a second R61 running Windows XP the counter is 40747 for an uptime of 1683 hours. That gives around 1 cycle / 3 minutes (vs. 3 cycles / minute for Linux!). The BIOS does not have any setting to change the HDD power management (the only power management adjustable from there is the CPU and PCI). Next step is to check if the Linux just use the default BIOS settings or it sets a very specific (and bad) value.