I want to install a few games, however, because I transferred all my games over to my unraid setup, I only have 80GB worth of SSD storage left on my desktop. Now, what I want to do is install my games to a share, however, for obvious reasons (E.G. games have hundreds of thousands of small 1KB to 2GB files and I have a game collection of > 2TB on steam, along with addons/maps/skins/textures/sounds that'll later be downloaded by custom servers) the game will be spread over many hard drives, however, my question is:-

 

How bad, really, is spinning a drive up, letting it run, and spinning down? Has anyone ever got a drive and just continually spun it up and spun it down until it breaks? If so, can someone link me to the report?

 

Oh, and the reason why I don't want to install it to a single drive is because that ruins the whole point of unraid, I want a simple way to spread my files over my drives with no hassle.

Before all the spin up/spin down control came into play. I used to run a linux mirrored server with 4 drives.

 

It was always 2 drives scsi 10,000 rpm spinning 24x7x365 and 4 ide/sata drives in RAID1. 24x7x365.

 

The drives usually lasted either 1 year or 3 years or better.

I.e. they would fail at 1 year, 2.5/3 years or they would last far beyond use.

This was back in the late 90s.

 

With unRAID. I've never had a drive that failed because of spin up/spin down.

 

Before my server was ruined I had 10 1tb wd green drives. These were purchased when they were the rage. (so that shows the age of the drives).

 

I had over 30 drives in total and only 1 of those WD green drives failed with bad sectors. I really think the sector issue was due to a bad power down. It passed all tests before the day I did the maintenance on the server.

 

I was able to save the data via ddrescue, then reuse the drive after running a couple of badblocks passes.

 

So in effect, out of all my drives since about 2007, I've never had a drive fail because of spin up/spin down issues.

It was 1 WD drive because of bad sectors.

 

I had some seagate 1tb's that had issues, those were 7200RPM in raid1 24x7x365.

 

I think there was something with the firmware on those.

 

Also, I had maxtor 10,000 RPM SAS drives purchased back in 2005 that ran 24x7x365 up until the day of the flood.

I actually purchased 4, but only used 2 in RAID1, keeping the other 2 in case I had a failed drive which never happened.

Those drives were almost 6 years old.

 

Drives are manufactured better today. I wouldn't worry about it.

I had set my server to spin up the cache, parity and the most used data drives in my server at 6am and keep them spinning until 9pm every day.

 

 

I want to install a few games, however, because I transferred all my games over to my unraid setup, I only have 80GB worth of SSD storage left on my desktop. Now, what I want to do is install my games to a share, however, for obvious reasons (E.G. games have hundreds of thousands of small 1KB to 2GB files and I have a game collection of > 2TB on steam, along with addons/maps/skins/textures/sounds that'll later be downloaded by custom servers) the game will be spread over many hard drives, however, my question is:-

 

How bad, really, is spinning a drive up, letting it run, and spinning down? Has anyone ever got a drive and just continually spun it up and spun it down until it breaks? If so, can someone link me to the report?

 

Oh, and the reason why I don't want to install it to a single drive is because that ruins the whole point of unraid, I want a simple way to spread my files over my drives with no hassle.

If you were power cycling dozens of times per day, perhaps you might get the spindle motor to wear. But "they" want you to power cycle desktop drives once/twice a work day and spin a shorter than 24x7 life.

 

I point you to the new practice of measuring drive life in power-on hours. Only power on time counts, not power cycles.