New WD hard drive. Load cycle count keeps increasing too often!

[nobb]

I upgraded my laptop's hard drive to a Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500GB 2.5" SATA. The model number is WD5000BEVT. Problem is that I have noticed my Load Cycle count (checked using HD Tune) keeps increasing slightly, even though I have not power cycled the notebook.

The drive only has about 14 Power on Hours and 14 Start Stop counts, but the Load Cycle Count is at 47 and rising. I know there has been this problem with linux and apple machines, but why is it happening on my Dell Inspiron 6400? I am running Vista 32bit Ultimate by the way. So is there any way to disable the hard drive from being so aggressive with the power settings? I have already trying poking around the power management and disabled the feature to turn off hard disk after X amount of time. I have even gone into the BIOS and disabled Serial ATA DIPM (Device Initiated Power Management). Still no luck.

Anyone have any ideas?

 

[VirtualLarry]

You could get a tool to set the APM value on the HD, that might be able to configure it to stop parking the heads. You need to find out from WD what the correct APM setting value is to do that though.

 

[nobb]

Thanks for the tip. Doing some more searching, I found this long thread on the issue:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=168425

It appears setting the APM to 254 solves this problem. But anyone know if it is possible to permanently set the APM on the drive without having to run hdparm or Notebook Hardware Control all the time? I cant find anything at all on the WD site...