external drives left powered on all the time

[beastman]

Whats the consenses of opinion on leaving these drives permanently on? I was thinking of getting a mini pc (for non demanding work and low watts/electricity) and adding a large USB drive and have them both permanently on so that the USB drive can act as media server to feed my Plex setup via NVidia Shield TV. I would look to set the drives to not spin down at all (the Mrs complains when movies dont load right away and I guess its down to my current setup, a current crappy MyCloud NAS and the existing USB attached drives waking up after being spun down). I would plan to back up the media on it. I could get a better NAS but I'd rather stick with the one I already have and maybe use that as a backup device and have a new spare cheapo mini pc to play with.

Is there anything wrong with this idea? Is having an external drive on 24/7 is a bad idea? Would the drive fail a lot quicker than normally expected?
Apart from getting a UPS, is there anything else I should consider?

thanks

 

[beastman]

Would the drives not still spin down due to inactivity even if they're externally powered? Have you messed around with the power settings? There might be a way of preventing them sleeping in there, selective suspend perhaps?

I'd use a software program to prevent the spin down, something like this: https://archive.codeplex.com/?p=nosleephd

Edit: or maybe this: https://archive.codeplex.com/?p=xsleep

I'm sure I've seen a another utility that amends the drives own built on sleep setting, but it was a while back and can't find it now.

 

[beastman]

Personally I'd not ever do it again. I've already lost several ExtHDDs, which I figure was down to leaving them permanently running to the point of collapse. I don't think they're supposed to be treated like that.
So no science or anything, just my opinion, but I strongly believe they're meant to be unplugged when not in direct use.

I suspect you are right and I guess its partly why there NAS kit and NAS firmware specific drives on the market. Just wish there was more than anecdotal stuff and more official data or info to back up the theory. Incidentally how long did you have the drives running?

 

[beastman]

Buying external drives and 'shucking' them to use in a NAS environment running 24/7 is pretty common because you can typically get them at half the price of internal drives. You're not guaranteed any particular drive model with externals, but high capacity (8TB+) WD Elements or My Book are very popular because they usually have high quality helium drives that shouldn't have any issues running 24/7.

Yeah, I've done it loads!