In my case it means the number of times the HD’s heads are moved to a ramp next to the platters. Depending on the manufacturer and HD model this can mean several things. Put easily the load cycle count is how often your HD decided to park its heads. You can see a value of 36,492 load cycle counts in 351 hours the HD was powered on, so approx. The puzzling fact here is the Load_Cycle_Count. So I installed smartmontools (either use MacPorts, fink or Homebrew) and checked: smartctl -a /dev/disk0 I experienced this myself, where one of my old hard drives started to sound like a frog :-/.
I pay attention to such things since I heard about problems with power management settings under Ubuntu, which could quickly wear down a hard drive. I recently got a new MacBook Pro and one interesting thing i noticed was light “click” (a clicking noise) from it whenever it was idle for a few seconds. This post provides a lot of background information and how to change these settings.
Short summary: Mac OS X’s default power management settings might wear your hard drive down unnecessarily.
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