I set up a loop to print the last value of the "193 Load_Cycle_Count"
line from command "smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sda" once a minute this
morning. I let it run all day, and after eight hours it never changed
from 328146. I shutdown (hibernated) the system and resumed a bit later
in my home office. The loop (which just resumed right along with
everything else) now prints a constant value of 328150 once a minute.
FWIW, the loop looks like:
for whoCares in /usr/bin/*; do # easy way to loop for a few days
sudo smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sda | egrep '^[ \t]*193' | awk '{print
$NF;}';
sleep 60;
done