HDD Longevity

bencho

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Which is the lesser of two evils:

having storage hard drives in your main box, start up and just spin when your computer is on all the time....

or

putting storage drives in an icydock and only turning it on when you need them?

In other words, countless unused hours of spin time, or constantly turning them all on and off.
 
Which is the lesser of two evils:

having storage hard drives in your main box, start up and just spin when your computer is on all the time....

or

putting storage drives in an icydock and only turning it on when you need them?

In other words, countless unused hours of spin time, or constantly turning them all on and off.

From a single drive standpoint it is pretty much six 1 / half dozen the other. If these drives are in an array, I have had more trouble than not with arrays that sleep and wake, especially if they are waking multiple times a day. If the volumes on the arrays are shared, all someone has to do in windows is hover or drag over a share and it will spin up). It is an additional strain on the power supply (takes more amperage to start the drives than keep them running) and more thermal hot/cold sessions on the hard drive itself.
 
Which is the lesser of two evils:

having storage hard drives in your main box, start up and just spin when your computer is on all the time....

or

putting storage drives in an icydock and only turning it on when you need them?

In other words, countless unused hours of spin time, or constantly turning them all on and off.

i would not worry about leaving them on, i have one drive that is starting to have problems but still works fine with no data corruption and its ancient, power on time on it is 2192 days!!! (yes 6 years) it has been on more days than it has been spun up (1,804 spin ups) just get a good monitoring program like HD sentinel that will keep track of all of your drives health and when red flags start showing up in the program its time to backup the data on that drive and stop relying on it to keep your data safe. i have had many HDD's over the years and only 1 drive has ever just up and died on me and it was a 750 gb seagate drive that had that dreaded firmware issue that killed them, had i kept its firmware up to date i'm confident it would still be running today.
 
I just changed how some of our computers were configured. I took a hard drive manufactured in 2002 out of a system that ran 24/7 and rebooted everyday. So the drive was on for 9 years, spinning up and spinning down. It never had any problems. Just too small to take up an IDE port.

I expect that concerns should be directed toward issues other than the care of hard drives
 
cool. thanks for answering.
i keep 3 drives in my system currently. 1 OS, 1 gaming, 1 downloads. I figured it would be best in this configuration to maximize efficiency so I could do multiple tasks without straining 1 hdd for multiple applications. I also keep a 4bay icy dock that reads each disk as an individual drive. I have this connected via esata. Lately I've been watching a lot of older movies and keep turning on the icydock. Was wondering if it has any negative effects since I'm spinning them up and down like every day, sometimes multiple times. Wasn't sure if I should just transfer them into my main box and have it run with my PC's main drives.
 
interesting question tho not sure anyone here could answer this with any authority, unless they work(ed) for a HD company.

people will provide their own personal experience but the sample size is just too small. so it's just too hard to say one way or another which method affects HDs more adversely.
the one thing you could say (with absolute certainly) is drives that are always spinning use more electricity. not such a big deal with a single drive, but certainly a consideration with multiple drives/RAID arrays.

hard drives will ultimately fail regardless of how they've been used. probably not worth thinking about this scenario, be better to look at data security. do you have multiple backups of your important data. will you data survive multiple catastrophic events?
 
I understand that all mechanical equipment will fail after prolonged usage, and I'm just looking for the "healthiest" method of using my hdd's. Enterprise level hdd's are built to withstand 24/7 usage but what about regular commercial level drives? Electricity usage is not really a concern of mine.

Technically all data that people make backups of is important. In this day and age, everyone would be hit pretty hard if they lost data on any level. It'd be too expensive for me to make multiple copies of everything, but I do keep a few externals/flash around for the most important things.

This became a concern as of late after one of my hdd's shit the bed :\ I was able to move most stuff off but a scan with Crystal Disk showed one just got bad sectors or something on spinup. So I was wondering if spinning up and down all the time would be "worse" for a hdd than just leaving it running all day.
 
I understand that all mechanical equipment will fail after prolonged usage, and I'm just looking for the "healthiest" method of using my hdd's. Enterprise level hdd's are built to withstand 24/7 usage but what about regular commercial level drives? Electricity usage is not really a concern of mine.

Technically all data that people make backups of is important. In this day and age, everyone would be hit pretty hard if they lost data on any level. It'd be too expensive for me to make multiple copies of everything, but I do keep a few externals/flash around for the most important things.

This became a concern as of late after one of my hdd's shit the bed :\ I was able to move most stuff off but a scan with Crystal Disk showed one just got bad sectors or something on spinup. So I was wondering if spinning up and down all the time would be "worse" for a hdd than just leaving it running all day.

tho enterprise drive have a few more features (for RAID and the like), not really sure they offer much over your standard desktop variety in regards to reliability. tho i will say the cheaper WD & Segate drives on the market now are probably inferior in this regard.

i don't think you're going to get a definitive answer on whether leaving a drive 'powered up 24/7' is better than 'sleeping/powering down' is better for a drives health, there are arguments for both.

there are degrees of security one can take with their data. no one says you have to backup multiple copies of *all* your data. for a regular home user, that's probably not feasible unless of course money is not an issue.

things like ones audio/visual library is something than can be replaced easily. your documents (word/excel/email/photos & home videos) are things that cannot be replaced easily. luckily these files generally don't take up anywhere as much space as ones music/tv/movie collection thus far more cost effective to keep backups for.

personally i have a few backups for my important data. have original location in 'document' folder on boot drive, a 2nd archived copy on separate drive in same system and a 3rd copy of files on NAS. technically you're supposed to have a copy off site (web storage) as well. for me, as soon as a HD is suspect, i no longer trust it to store anything. if it's less than 12mths old, drop it at the retailer for a new one. outside 12mths and before the units warrantee, i'll contact the HD manufacture for a RMA.

you said you already keep a few backups of your important stuff. as long as the backups are up-to-date and done regularly. the other stuff (music & videos), you provide as much security as your budget allows. if you've got that covered, wouldn't waste too much time worrying about it.
if you have a drive that's flaky, personally i'd start moving stuff off it as soon as it become apparent and replace the drive asap.

if you want better peace of mind for the larger less important files (music/video's), perhaps investigate RAID arrays. either to install in your primary PC or as a separate box (headless box you can RPD into OR NAS). can look at RAID5 array tho RAID6 is safer at the cost of space. RAID1 is the safest at the cost of half your disk space.
 
if you want better peace of mind for the larger less important files (music/video's), perhaps investigate RAID arrays. either to install in your primary PC or as a separate box (headless box you can RPD into OR NAS). can look at RAID5 array tho RAID6 is safer at the cost of space. RAID1 is the safest at the cost of half your disk space.

That is not exactly true. Take for example a 6 drive RAID6 array vs 6 drives in 3 RAID1s. ANY 2 drives in the RAID6 could fail and the array would still stay up. If 2 drives in any 1 of those RAID1s goes you are SOL.

In any case, take a sharpie marker, look in a mirror and write "RAID IS NOT A BACKUP" on your forehead :)
 
Everything I've read and been told says that leaving your drives on is better than constantly turning them on and off. That's why you don't let Windows turn them off, etc. So if power is not a concern, and they do not overheat, leave them on all the time. I've got a Seagate backup that's on all the time, even when the comp isn't (I'm lazy) and it's doing fine without a case or fan in an EZ-dock.
 
From a mechanical standpoint, the most difficult thing electric motors do is start up, especially smallish ones like these. They are rated for the continuous load of the platter stack, once said load is spinning. Actually getting them up to speed is a strain, but one they can handle for limited periods of time and afterwards they get to cool back down. They will be able to handle this cycle a finite number of times before they can't anymore. So from the standpoint of the motor windings, it's almost certainly better to leave it running all the time.

The other half of the equation is the bearings that hold the platter stack and motor in place while they spin. These will not suffer much if any extra strain during startup and spin down, but they do wear steadily during operation. They will last a finite number of hours before they wear out to the point of failure, notwithstanding additional stress placed on them such as bumping the drive during operation, or having substantial vibration transferred into the drive from other components.

Those are the mechanics, basically. Thermal cycling from off and on cycles could possibly affect bearing life as well, but drives don't really run that hot. You're talking about cycling between 20C and maybe 40C, and they do take a bit of time to warm up and cool off because of the usually substantial metal casing. Not a big deal imho. I generally run my drives 24/7, especially enterprise drives like my 15K Cheetahs because they take a pretty long time to spin up, and will probably not be harmed by 5 years of 24 hour running. I've also run consumer SATA drives for years at a time in the same way with no problems. If you're not worried about power usage, or noise, I say leave em spinning.
 
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