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Backup server w/WD Red drives - best to keep always on?


ElJimador

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Posted

Quick question, and apologies if this has been covered here before.  Per my sig I have only WD Red drives in both my main and backup servers and to this point I've always kept both servers running 24/7 because I thought that was healthier for Red drives particularly if not for all spinning drives to avoid a lot of power cycles.  However since I usually only write to the backup server maybe once a week I'm wondering if it would make more sense to power it off when not in use?  It wouldn't save a ton on my power bill because w/a 9w TDP processor it only sips power to begin with (typically drawing 30w or less at idle, per kill-a-watt).  Still, that does add up over time.  So with that in mind, is it really likely that 24/7 operation will prolong the life of the drives enough to pay that difference?  If it's something like a break even proposition I'd rather err on the side of preserving the drives and just keep the server running.  But if I'm misinformed and it's not really helping, I don't want to just throw money away for no reason.  Thanks for any input.

Posted

For your use case, I'd just power off the backup server and power it up when you 're going to use it.

 

That's what I do with my backup server [Actually, the backup script that runs automatically turns on the server via a WOL packet; then waits 3 minutes before actually starting the backup].

 

Modern drives are rated for a fairly large number of load/unload cycles -- and these occur whenever the drive spins up/spins down ... not just at power cycling.    WD Reds are rated for 600,000 cycles ... so there's nothing to be concerned about with a use case where they're going to have perhaps 50-100 cycles / year  :)

Posted

Thanks Gary.  Interesting to know that powering on and off doesn't add any more wear to the drives than spinning up/down.  That being the case, I'll definitely switch to powering off when not in use.  Thanks for the help.

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