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[VirtualLarry]

I have a related question. I have an Acer Aspire One Netbook, with a 240GB Mushkin Chronos Deluxe SSD in it. Should I change my HDD power off after settings to disable cutting the power to the HDD? I've been having issues with the SSD in my netbook, and wonder if this setting could be causing problems.

 

[greenhawk]

1) only the drive that is to be accessed.

down side is that if you have anything like anti-virus running it generally wakes the drives up anyway.

2) no idea, but given the start up time of a ssd from idle, it is probable too fast to notice. And probably ignores the "go to sleep" command from the OS.

 

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[JAG87]

Windows has that 'turn off hard disk after' power saving option, and it would be good to have the mechanical drives spin down when not in use.

Actually, that is probably the best way to kill your drives in a shorter time.

 

[KingFatty]

Actually, that is probably the best way to kill your drives in a shorter time.

Why would this be?

I think the heat and hours of operation is what kills drives, not spinning up or down. If the drive is allowed to spin down, wouldn't that prevent heat and hours of operation, thereby saving the drive?

 

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[VirtualLarry]

Also, I don't think standard consumer drives are built to be running 24/7 - in fact I think I even read that in a disclaimer once. These are not enterprise drives, they're Samsung F3s and WD Caviar SE16s.

That's a cop-out by mfgs, designed to deny warranty claims.

There's no reason a properly-mfged HD cannot be run 24/7. I do it with all of mine.

 

[KingFatty]

They say that the majority of bearing wear happens during spin up.

I've wondered about what fails when I hard drive fails. In my experience, my hard drive failure was related to power issues blowing the electronics and making the drive dead.

But for studies, like the Google study, do they identify what failed on the drive? How often is the failure caused by bad bearings? I know that the bearings went out on a cooling fan for me, but I've never had a drive failure due to bearings, is it very common compared to something like a head crash or click of death?

 

[greenhawk]

Why would it wake them up unless a scan is scheduled?

some anti-virus programs do not just work when scheduled, they trigger progressive scanning of files to occur when the system is idle as well.

And even if you have the anti-virus program set to only work on exe/com files, and not to search through compressed files, it will still need the drive to start up just to get a folder contents list.

 

[Schmide]

Actually, that is probably the best way to kill your drives in a shorter time.

I see this statement all the time, but every bit of evidence I've read points to head crashes as the major cause of drive failure. Other problems down the list are heat, dust, power surge, jarring, water, and so on. I have never seen spinup listed. I think it's an urban legend.

I let my drives spin down. Heat is kind of high on the list!

 

[Pray To Jesus]

If your harddrive is overheating you got issues

 

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[JAG87]

I see this statement all the time, but every bit of evidence I've read points to head crashes as the major cause of drive failure. Other problems down the list are heat, dust, power surge, jarring, water, and so on. I have never seen spinup listed. I think it's an urban legend.

I let my drives spin down. Heat is kind of high on the list!

Heat has nothing to do with it, as long as it's controlled properly. It is actually changes in temperature that are worse for it.

Having it sit at 35C 24/7 is better than going up and down between room temperature and 35C.

 

[Anteaus]

Actually, that is probably the best way to kill your drives in a shorter time.

Only if the spindown timer is set inappropriately for usage. You can keep it to default for drives that are only used now and then (backup drives, etc), but if you have a drive that is used less frequently than your system drive but still semiregular, say a media drive, then its up to the user to choose a more reasonable spin down time or disable it.

Powering down a drive over long periods of inactivity is far better than keeping it idling 24/7 for no reason. It will extend drive life and lower energy costs. Just gotta pay attention to whats going on and adjust accordingly.

 

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[Carson Dyle]

I have a file server with eleven 2 TB drives that I allow Windows to power down after 15 minutes of inactivity. I access some of those drives no more than a couple times a month. It's senseless to keep them spinning 24/7.

I have one drive on that server (containing my music library) that I find inconvenient waiting for it to spin up. So I created a simple batch file that accesses the drive and schedule it to run every 10 minutes to keep the drive spinning.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I always keep disk's spinning, then again most of them are in raid, it would be bad to make them spin down.

The constant on/off is also hard on the drives. It's best to try to keep them at a fairly constant operating state and temperature.

 

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[Carson Dyle]

How did you deal with the random idle drive access issue I mentioned before? What services do you have to disable to stop Windows from spinning them up every 5 minutes?

They don't spin up. I know that for a fact because anytime I do access one I wait for it to come to life. I have no anti-virus running on the server and I don't run the Windows indexing service.

 

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[coffeejunkee]

That resource monitor is likely the culprit. It probably reads out smart data, but this data is actually on the platter itself and therefore the disk needs to spin up. Speedfan, HWmonitor etc all prevent disks from being turned off.

 

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[Emulex]

1 minute with osx for ssd. bad?