Load Cycle count increasing even though Head Parking is disabled

I have two IronWolf Pro (ST10000NT001) drives in a QNAP DAS. Before putting them in the DAS, I used SeaChest to disable EPCfeature and powerBalanceFeature, and verified that the settings had stuck. However, I've noticed that the load cycle count will still occasionally increase even if the system hasn't been restarted. For example, I might see the load cycle on both drives increase by +1 in 24 ~hours.

I'm NOT worried about the increasing load cycle count in and of itself. It's not like it's happening at a rapid rate. I'm just concerned that it might be the symptom of some other issue with the DAS, such as random disconnections (though I can't see any evidence of this in Event Viewer).

So, my question is: Is there any reason for occasional head parking even when head parking has been disabled? For example, maybe it's part of some housekeeping routine of the drive?

Other notes:

I've observed this behavior with the DAS on two different PCs.
The DAS does not appear to have any kind of power saving/standby feature that spins down idle drives. I've only ever seen it spin down drives when it's disconnected, ejected, or when the host system shuts down, and the manual states as much.
The Windows "Turn off drives after..." setting is set to Never/0.
I've disabled all the relevant USB power saving features in Windows.
This is not a case of Windows Update restarting the PC. I know this for sure because a restart causes two load cycles due to the disks being spun up twice during POST, and I'm only seeing the drives increase by one load cycle count at a time.
I don't think it's a problem with the drives themselves since it's happening on both.

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2 comments

I used to disable EPC and PowerBalance on my Seagate drives and observed the same behavior. After awhile of using Seachest to disable these functions, I decided to re-enable them.

Mostly because I see no need to have the head hovering over my media at all times. I have no reason to save power, but I made this decision based upon how uncommmon it actually is to disable EPC and PB. Aside from a half dozen tech articles and various online posts.

In order for the drive to even get close to the amount of cycles they are rated for, you'd have to be witnessing some extremely aggressive head parking. (Based on 600k cycles) To give you an idea my drives park about 25 times daily on avg. (I have 3 min S.M.A.R.T. check intervals)

In my opinion and apparently every drive manufactuerer's default setting it's a good idea to leave defauly settings in place unless you have a really good reason. Even coming from a 24/7 always on, never spin-down datahoarder like myself I favor the "protections" of having the head safely placed away from the media over disabling EPC and PB. But to each is own.
- I put the drives back into a PC to triple-check the EPC settings with showEPCSettings, and they definitely have not reset:
  
  Name Current Timer Default Timer Saved Timer Recovery Time C S
  
  Idle A 0 *1 *1 1 Y Y Idle B 0 *1200 *1200 4 Y Y Idle C 0 6000 6000 60 Y Y Standby Z 0 9000 9000 150 Y Y
  
  I also ran them in the PC for 24 hours and the load cycles went up another two points for both drives, so I guess that rules out the DAS. Again, the PC had HDD spindown disabled and did not restart during that time.
  
  As for the wisdom of enabling/disabling head parking: You make a compelling argument there. The same thoughts have occurred to me and I'm pretty much on the fence about it. Maybe I'll reenable parking and see how rapidly it climbs.
  
  I would still love to know what exactly why it's increasing when it's supposed to be disabled, just to satisfy my curiosity.