To spindown or not to spindown that is the question :)


wgstarks

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I'm not really concerned about a few extra dollars on my power bill or any small increase in noise from fans running faster. My main concern would be prolonging the life expectancy of my HDD's. I just don't know enough about them to be able to make an informed decision on whether spinning down the drives will prolong their life span? Or maybe constant start/stops reduces their life span?

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This topic has been beat to death on the internet back and forth. I'm on the side of keeping them spun up 24/7 is better for the drives and that is what I do. There also always ready to go not having to wait for them to spin up. Even if you were to have them spun down there seems to always be some plugin, docker, service, etc. that spins them up again no matter how you have them set to spin down so having them spun up all the time is much better IMHO and this is just my opinion. I also look at it as why would the drive manufacturers record start and stops in the smart data if that did not add wear to the drive.

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I have only seen a small handful of drives totally fail while spinning. Most of the time as long as the drive stays powered up and spinning, some data is recoverable.

 

I've seen a whole heap (100's) of drives fail totally after a power cycle.

 

(Disclaimer, most people tend to power cycle a machine to trouble shoot it, so it's quite likely a large percentage of those power cycled dead drives would fall into the failed while spinning category, but I'd never see it because it was power cycled by the time it got to me.)

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I've been using the spindown/sleep for almost 10 years now. Not a single HDD died of it. The oldest in use is over 5 years old (a 3TB WD-Red).

Four HDDs died due to Platter problems (weak sectors), but not a single one has affected the motor or the mechanics.

The REDs have a Load Cycle Count of 600.000. It takes a long time to reach this limit...

Edited by Zonediver
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