u/Advanced_Mine_8886

I have a 24TB Seagate Hard Drive (ST24000DM001) that has an abnormally high amount of load/unload cycles after 1 year of use. Power on hours are at around 3000, and load/unload cycles are nearly 12,000.

In windows power options I have set HDD idling timer to 0, so it never goes inactive, and yet I notice the load/unload cycle is steadily climbing up each day, even when my PC doesn't sleep. In resource monitor, there is always some background activity, so it would make no sense for the drive to go inactive, and APM (advanced power management) isn't even activated on this HDD.

I have noticed that whenever I'm accessing the hard drive, say, editing, and then I leave for maybe a couple minutes (maybe even less than a minute), go back, I would hear some noises. The files would load instantly, so I assume it didn't go inactive, but the load/unload cycle count would increase.

So my questions are:

1. wtf is going on

2. is it some firmware level power saving feature

3. is it worth it to disable using WSL

Whenever I select a transcode in plex, for example, 4K to something like 480p, the speed in which it transcodes varies heavily. On my PC and Macbook, it's basically instantaneous, while on my iPhone it takes about 3-5 seconds for the transcode to finish, and on an android, even more time, up to 7 seconds.

I was told all transcoding is done on the server side, or whatever device is actually running the server. Not client side. So why is there a massive difference between transcoding video on a computer vs mobile? I'm using the same video and transcoding down to the same quality, Why is this?