Can you kill a Drive Spinning it Down???

[rarebear]

I started shutting down my HDDs in Power Manager Option after and hour of no use..

I have killed two new Drives in the last few months and one was just a few weeks old..

Do you think I should just let them stay at speed 24/7 ????????

 

[mchammer]

My 2c, run them all day and have your monitor sleep after about 20 minutes with no screen saver to waste GPU power. Then when you go to sleep, put the PC in S4 (Hibernate). Wake it in the morning.

If you have Vista you can save some time on the morning wake by using the hybrid sleep/hibernate. It will keep the memory live as in S3 state but also write out the contents to disk in case the power goes out long enough to drain your UPS. (You do have a UPS since you are concerned about you drives?)

When your PC is running during the day if there is an extended power outage, the UPS will put the PC in S4 mode (XP) or hybrid S3/S4 mode (Vista) which will assure all your data is safe if you are out running errands and tend to leave some windows open.

 

[WildW]

I have 4 drives that spin down when not in use, mainly for quietness, and they've been fine for the last year. I guess the spin-up is the most stressful part of drive operation, but they're designed for it to a degree.

Your drives dying is probably just bad luck. Unless mine being fine is good luck. Too small a sample to say much.

I wish there were a way to give each drive a different setting for minutes-idle-before-powering-off, including never for the C drive.