Are you sure you're not describing Western Digital drives? WD a few years back decided to curse their 'eco green' range with an 8.3 second head unload time out which basically resulted in them reaching the original 300,000 limit within 6 months of run time. They revised the limit to 600,000 cycles but this just meant it would still hit the new limit after just one year's worth of run time.
The only saving grace being that they supplied a little dos utility called wdidle3.exe you could run off a dos bootable disk (floppy or CD or USB pen drive) to up the time out to a max of 300 seconds or even disable it completely (although selecting that option never worked for me whilst it apparently did for others. Go figure!).
You'd have thought that WD would have learnt their lesson from the anguished cries of outrage by many of their 'valued customers' but apparently not if the 4TB WD RED I bought late last year is any guide. I didn't think I'd be having to dig my wdidle3 floppy disk out of the pile ever again but I'm glad I did.
I had a notion to check the setting on this brand new drive (zero PoH figure) just in case and was surprised to see it set to the old default of 8.3 seconds. I just set it to the max of 300 rather than try to totally disable it altogether since a 5 minute head parking time out makes a huge reduction in the rate of head parking events yet still provides the benefit it was _meant_ to provide. God knows which idiot thought ( and _still_ thinks!) an 8.3 second time out would be (is) a sensible default.
So, a word to the wise. If you choose a western digital drive, run the wdidle3 utility to check for the the 8.3 second default and adjust to the max of 300 seconds. You can try the effect of the disable setting option but don't be surprised if this has no effect.
Incidently, I spotted this high head unload count figure in one of a pair of 2TB Samsung SpinPoints in July last year where it had topped a million cycles. The other drive had only clocked a mere 160,000 cycles.
The difference must have been down to my experimenting with the power saving levels about a year earlier. Although they had both been set to the same levels, for some reason, one of them was running on a different power management regime.
I surmised that this was an aspect of their functioning that may have needed a full power down reset to invoke the programmed change so I set to the minimum power saving level for both drives and did a full shutdown power reset.
After that, the head unload cycle counters for both drives were stopped dead in their tracks (but not before the damage had already been done to the unit that had clocked in excess of a million such cycles - the other stopped at 168982 where it sits to this day).
The Million Cycle drive had started showing a climbing MZER figure before I spotted the excessive head unload count value. Although I did manage to replace it before the smart monitoring daemon started emailing error reports, subsequent testing revealed it was 'One Sick Puppy'. The excessive head unload cycles had finally taken their toll.
So, yet another word to the wise. Keep an eye on the head unload count whenever you change the power saving level settings on non Western Digital drives (the head unload time out doesn't seem to alter with such power management changes, only by use of the wdidle3 utility).
"Everone Knows" about the default 8.3 seconds timeout head unload issue with Western Digital drives right enough but they're not the only make of drive that employs head unloading as part of its built in power management regime which, unlike the WD drives can be altered through the standard power management settings so it's one 'gotcha' to look out for with _any_ make of drive.
HTH & HAND :-)