Vladan, It appears i have thrown out my last 2 WD disks just recently ... ;) The reason, of course, was they were worn out. I didn't know of the idle3 problem, then. Anyway, now i'm using only SG and even fresh new drives always show several 'pre failure' values in smartd. I'm lazy using gsmartcontrol, btw. > Is there any way to reduce numbers of load cycles on PATA drives? Beats me .... sorry.