I came across the issue of ever increasing Load_Cycle_Count (once nearly 8s) on a new laptop, with a 500GB Toshiba drive.
I tried setting the apm value to 255 (and also experimented with 254, 253). The Load_Cycle_Count rise rate came slightly down with this, though it still kept increasing at least by a couple of hundred daily. As a last resort I wrote the following loop and invoked it from /etc/rc.local: while [ true ]; do date; smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep Load_Cycle_Count; sleep 30; done > /tmp/hdtick sleep 30 was arrived at with trial error (sleep 60) was found to be insufficient. It stopped increasing Load_Cycle_Count, though I am curious whether this is safe to do. Hope I haven't found just another way of reducing the life of the drive! Also, curious why apm setting did not solve the problem in the first place. Mayuresh.
