You guys might find this study from google interesting: 
<a href="http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en/us/archive/disk_failures.pdf">http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en/us/archive/disk_failures.pdf</a> <br>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 3:05 PM, Frank Steinmetzger <span dir="ltr">&lt;<a href="mailto:Warp_7@gmx.de" target="_blank">Warp_7@gmx.de</a>&gt;</span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div class="im">On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 11:38:34AM +0200, David Haller wrote:<br>
<br>
&gt; &gt;I bought my current internal laptop disk for Christmas 2008.  It&#39;s a Samsung<br>
&gt; &gt;HM500JI (with 500 GB).  Early on I noticed that, according to smartctl, its<br>
&gt; &gt;Load_Cycle_Count is increasing every 2 or 3 seconds.  I even asked Samsung<br>
&gt; &gt;about this, but they either couldn&#39;t give any clue or didn&#39;t want to, b/c the<br>
&gt; &gt;Serial Number is from Turkey, so not from the European market.<br>
&gt; &gt;<br>
&gt; &gt;Anyhoo... I just checked the values:<br>
</div>&gt;&gt;[…]<br>
<div class="im">&gt; &gt;But the load cycle count is at almost 12.3 million(!).  That just can&#39;t be<br>
&gt; &gt;right.  I stopped believing that number a good while ago.<br>
&gt;<br>
&gt; As I said in another mail: laptop drives are built for frequent<br>
&gt; unloading. Your number does seem a bit high though, that&#39;s about 1000<br>
&gt; load cycles per hour...<br>
<br>
</div>My Pa bought the same HDD model for his laptop a few months back. Last weekend<br>
I visited him and loaded a diag tool on his Windows. It showed 20 or 30.000<br>
cycle counts. So I guess my model just has a bad firmware or summit like that.<br>
Perhaps that&#39;s why it was so cheap back then (only ~62€ for a 500 GB drive by<br>
the end of 2008).<br>
<br>
Oh well, I&#39;ll just have to remember to do backups a bit more often.<br>
<div class="im">--<br>
Gruß | Greetings | Qapla&#39;<br>
Please do not share anything from, with or about me with any Facebook service.<br>
<br>
</div>A boss is a human just like everyone else, he just doesn’t know.<br>
</blockquote></div><br>