Keep hdd spinning or turn off when not in use?

kmax86 · 22 Apr 2012 at 15:59

Hi there,

I have a couple hard drives at the moment they turn themselves off when not being used as I have an ssd for the os. However there are times that they just turned off and I need to use them so they spin up again and so on.

Will this on / off degrade the hdd overtime ?

welshdragon · 22 Apr 2012 at 17:14

There is currently a lot of argument over whetehr it does or not. Personally I dont think it will adversely impact a drives life too much. If the drive has problems then of course it might excacerbate those but to be honest I dont think it really matters. Most modern 'green' drives are designed to park the the heads to save power etc

I use an SSD and have a WD Black as my storage volume. I have set it to be always on as when using my computer I most likely will be accessing it. However, if I left my pc on and unattended for a periods of time and/or had several mechanical drives I probably would set them to go to sleep.

I use the hibernate/deep hibernate function on my Synology DS212 as that is on 24/7 so it is worthwhile to do so. When the drives spin down they normally stay down then overnight and are active in the day.

Philtor · 22 Apr 2012 at 17:27

I have a Vertex 2E as my boot drive and a normal HDD for storage which is set to power down after 10 mins. No need for it to be running constantly.

kmax86 · 22 Apr 2012 at 17:53

cheers, i guess its down to personal preference whether perma on or sleep when not it use

IronWarrior · 23 Apr 2012 at 05:04

I keep mine always on, they are modern drives so they only use a few watts when idle.

Think of this, dedicated servers always have HDD's always on which last for years and years...