On Sun, 4 Nov 2007, Alberto Gonzalez wrote:..
The problem comes from a very high rate of load/unload cycles of the heads that reaches the 300.000-600.000 limit in 2-3 years (with smartmontools it can checked it with "smartctl -A /dev/sda") . There are reports of HDD dying even earlier for this problem [2]
I use:
# hdparm -B 255 /dev/hda
to get rid of the problem with an ATA disk where I do not care that much about power consumption. I do not know what the equivalent for a SATA disk would be, but chances are it will be easier to track it down with the reference above.