I currently have my drives set to spin down after 1 hour.  I'm considering changing this so the drives never spin down.  The delay with waiting for drives to spin back up is getting really annoying.  I know there have been arguments that it's actually worse for your drives to always be spinning back up and down, but I have no idea.

 

Does anyone always keep their drives spinning?

10s wait for spinup or extra $$$ on your electricity bill,  Which do you prefer?

When I had a cache drive I set it to two hours and everything else 1 hour.

 

I have one drive which for me is disk4 that I put working files directly on it opposed to via a share I setup as a 2hour delay so if I walk away its there still running. I thought about changing it to 4hours, but its been fine at 2 for now.

 

The reason I don't leave it all running is I don't need 6 drives spinning for the sake of spinning when as of now I'm 1,000 miles away from home on a trip and id rather the UPS have the extra battery protection than the convience of walking in and have an instant fix.

 

As for watching movies I use XBMC and when I scroll through all my movies its quick since everything is cached on my HTPC so there is no delay when it comes to finding what I want. When I click on a video to play there is a few second delay, but honestly id rather have that delay than getting up and loading a disk.

I let my main document and music drives spin for a couple hours before automatic spin down.

My movie disks I let spin down after an hour.

 

This works for me because I usually have an idea of what I want to watch.

Go to the machine, locate it. trigger a spin up of that drive and I'm ready to go.

 

What does bother me is if I accidentally cd to a user share that encompasses a large number of disk. I have to wait for them all to spin up in succession.  I may forgo user shares or do some other indexing mechanism.

Nope, I spin them all down after an hour.  Gives me that warm and fuzzy feeling to see all but the one disk I'm using spun down.