External Hdd health

[protokatie]

As some may remember from other posts; my fileserver uses external drives for various reasons.

The problem I have been having is that these are "green" drives which means that after 5 minutes of no activity they spin down (this is in the external controller's firmware and cannot be altered). So out of concern of 10 to 20 spin up cycles a day I found a program that forces the disks to stay spun up all the time.

My question; Is keeping the drives spinning better or worse than letting them spin down 10 to 20 times a day?

I know some of the pro's and cons of each (eg Higher heat if kept spun all the time vs hot/cold transitions, etc...)

Anyone have any (hopefully non anecdotal) information on which would be better for keeping the drive running for more years? BTW the drives are all 1TB Fantom Green Drives.

[lilshawn]

you could argue this all year long and still not get a conclusive answer.

i personally spin them up... and if after 30 mins, of no activity spin down... no sense keeping them running.

WD green drives are a different story. not much you can do. i personally prefer the blue

[protokatie]

Yep. Could always argue this, and if I could set the spin down time that would be best. The problem is that it is all or nothing. Either I have a spin down after 5 minutes or I keep them spinning all the time.

If I had a real choice, I would set them for spin down after 2 hours... :shrugs

[WhereEaglesDare]

I install DVRs that record and write to the drives constantly 24/7 and we have used Seagate, WD, etc and other than a few versions of Seagate being issues they last for 3-7 years before we replace them, I currently have about 40 in the field right now that I maintain and it is rare that there is a full fledge HDD failure.  More often its the PSU or VGA card or just simply corrupted software.

So take this as you will.