In case with smartctl you notice that the load/unload cycles counter increases very rapidly, there is a way to decrease that with hdparm.

E.g. for sda:

sudo hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda

This setting is retained after at reboot. 254 means low power saving by APM 255 means disables, but 254 is a more effective setting because 255 is not always implemented and 254 is instead almost the equivalent of disabled. 127 or lower means not only a more frequent load/unload but it also starts to turn off the spinning.

To check the current value for sda

sudo hdparm -B /dev/sda