This is a very concerning statement. If you are asking these kind of questions, then maybe you should not be doing this kind of a change.
I’m not trying to be disrespectful but rather honest and concerned that you may cause harm to your system and no one wants to see that.
As for the physical work, that depends on how familiar you are with the internals of a computer. Right now I’d say you have little to no knowledge on this topic but I’d be happy to be proven wrong.
Also, if you read the old TrueNAS forms, you should have read that WD changed the warranty to 300,000 to 600,000 load cycles. If you have 80,000 load cycles on one drive, you likely have a Power On Hours value greater than 6,667 hours, which is good. I suspect you have many more hours than that. 300,000 load cycles would equate to 2.85 years, assuming it parked every 5 minutes, which means you would be writing a small amount of data (a few bytes) every 5 minutes which is unlikely.
Should you make the timer change?
Take your Power On Hours and multiply by 24 to give you a value of minutes. Divide those minutes by the load cycle count. What is the value you get? This is the average time in minutes between head parking for the life of your drive. If your value is greater than 10, that is decent, but many of us are shooting for the greater than 30 minutes value. I prefer to never see my heads parked.
Here is a more objective way to do this and it would be more accurate as well… Run smartctl -a /dev/sda > sda_2025_07_22.txt for example. This will create a file called sda_2025_07_22.txt. Wait 1 day, do the same thing again smartctl -a /dev/sda > sda_2025_07_23.txt, and do it once again 6 days later smartctl -a /dev/sda > sda_2025_07_29.txt and now we compare the data. Using simple subtraction, compare the first two text files, The difference for the load cycle count is how many time it did it in 24 hours. That is really too small of a sample size unless the value is over 200. Next compare the first and the last text files, the difference here in the load cycle count will be closer to real life using TrueNAS. I have no idea where those drives were before but if they were in a different environment, then you are guessing about how bad they are affected while being used in a TrueNAS setup. Hopefully your difference for the week is below 336 (30 minute average load cycle over ). If the values look good, I would not mess with the timers.
The program to change the timers will only impact WD drives, no other drives. If your M.2 drive is WD, it will also not be affected. The program checks to see if the drive supports this change, it does not just write some data to a firmware and hope it got it right.
Please don’t take offence to my bluntness, I’d rather you be a little frustrated at me than really frustrated if you damaged your computer. Also, if you do decide to dive into the computer, ensure you are wearing an ESD bracelet or similar and the computer is unplugged and grounded. While many of us can get away without ESD protection, it depends on a few factors, one big one is being the humidity in the air. I live in a very humid environment, and I practice “Touch a Nut” something I learned in the military. You always put one hand on the metal chassis before doing anything inside the case, and try to keep touching the metal while working, if not continuous, at least periodically. The ESD bracelet takes care of this if you wear one.
A very long posting to say “Just be careful”.
