HDD misbehaving - Aspire E5-572G

Hello,

Recently bought an E5/Aspire 572G(39K0). I am very disapointed, it does not have official Windows 7 drivers. Although I decided not to return it or scrap it - got some work arounds and Windows 7 was up and runnign fully operational.

Now I am noticing something strange - the hard drive is spinning up and down for no reason. I have changed the settings for turning off the hard drive in Win - it should never turn off. But surprisingly, it turns off after a minute or two(randomly, sometimes takes more - like 5 minutes). And after turning off it remains like this for another minute or two and then spins up by itself. 

I have the 572G for 1 week and the SMART shows over 1000 start/stop counts. This is insane. Is this an idiotic option for the drive to save power, idioctic option in the chipset itself or this is simply a manufacturing defect?

Going like this, the drive will have 10k start/stop count for 50 days and 70k start/stop counts for a year. Based on my expirience, drives are very likely to fail on the 100k count.

Yes, i know laptop drives are believed to have 600k count fail rate - a lie. Been there, saw them fail at 100k.

Not to mention that the hard drive is waaaaay to slow in transfer(thanks Acer), waaay too noisy(thanks WD, just don`t lie about it, please) and waaaay too slow in response times. Adding up the fact it is making horrible noise at startup like every 5 minutes, even idle - this is a nightmare.

My question is - is this a defected drive, defected chipset, i missed some option to tweak, i messed up the windows 7 drivers(doubt it, everything works as expected, except this), or this is a normal behaviour for this model? If it is like this - the drive is going for replacement or the entire machine is going to be replaced(i love myself too much to torture myself like this). Hope someone could give me some info on this...