Longer disk life with unraid vs raid?

[ben42153251]

Hey folks,

 

I'm putting together an unraid box, I have some questions:

 

1) Do all disks need to be spinning to write data or just the data disk + parity?

2) Are people seeing longer lifespan from drives by leaving them spun down most of the time with rarely accessed data?

 

Whats the oldest drive you have?

Edited September 25, 2020 by ben42153251

[Hoopster]

11 hours ago, ben42153251 said:

1) Do all disks need to be spinning to write data or just the data disk + parity?

All disks do not need to be spinning, just the target disk and parity disk(s).  UnRAID lets you set a spin down delay on each drive.  Mine are set to one hour.  After that long with no activity, the drive spins down.

 

On the other hand, you can get write speeds 2x plus times faster if all data drives are spun up during writes.  This is known as Turbo Write.  There is a plugin to manage Turbo Write on demand, if desired, rather than having all disks spun up all the time.  It's your choice how you handle spinning up/down your drives.

 

11 hours ago, ben42153251 said:

2) Are people seeing longer lifespan from drives by leaving them spun down most of the time with rarely accessed data?

Many in these forums will argue that spinning drives down/up as needed is actually harder on the drives than if they remain spun up all the time.  Could be true.  I spin mine down when not in use.  My oldest drives are almost 9 years old and have never had any problems.

Edited September 25, 2020 by Hoopster

[charlescc1000]

Unraid can be configured to spin down all drives in your array (this includes parity) when not in use.  I have it setup this way, I believe they spin down after 15 minutes of no use.  My goal is to keep the server quieter and cooler.  The location of my Unraid & FreeNAS servers struggles with airflow and cooling so I try to keep heat to a minimum.

 

Does this mean longer drive life?

I do not know, I believe it would depend on use-case.  I can make some guesses:

 

The spin down configuration is key.  If the drives spin down and shortly later spin up, I would imagine that is worse for the drives than leaving them spinning the entire time.  This pattern would result in the drives constantly spinning down and then spinning up again.

If once the drives spun down, they remained that way for quite a while before spinning up - this may improve drive health over time?  Not sure.

 

If my Unraid server were located in an environment that had better cooling, I would consider leaving them spun up 24/7.