So, Western Digital RED drives are optimised for NAS systems.

This may be more of a poll and I understand that each person's usage of their NAS is different, but...

What is a good spin down time for these drives? Should they be spun down at all, or just left running 24/7?

It's really a case of heat vs more mechanical head moving/parking. High(er) temperatures and frequent head (un)parking can reduce the life of a hard drive.

Ultimately, we all want hard drives to last longer.

 

With that in mind, I'm interested to hear what people think.

I've got 6x 2TB WD REDs in my unRAID at the moment; set to 4 hours (no special reason).

 

Thanks!

 

I always struggle when searching for topics on this drive, because some refer to it by its longer name. I'm going to throw down some keywords here to make it easier to stumble upon this thread: western digital red, wd red, spin down

So, Western Digital RED drives are optimised for NAS systems.

This may be more of a poll and I understand that each person's usage of their NAS is different, but...

What is a good spin down time for these drives? Should they be spun down at all, or just left running 24/7?

It's really a case of heat vs more mechanical head moving/parking. High(er) temperatures and frequent head (un)parking can reduce the life of a hard drive.

Ultimately, we all want hard drives to last longer.

 

With that in mind, I'm interested to hear what people think.

I've got 6x 2TB WD REDs in my unRAID at the moment; set to 4 hours (no special reason).

 

Thanks!

 

I always struggle when searching for topics on this drive, because some refer to it by its longer name. I'm going to throw down some keywords here to make it easier to stumble upon this thread: western digital red, wd red, spin down

 

I've got 6 3TB Reds, and set the spindown timer to one hour.  At that setting, there's NO concern about ever getting close to the rated spinup cycles for the drives ... and excellent power savings on the server.    But if you're more comfortable with 4 hours, that's fine too.    It really makes very little difference.