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For those with a home server: put your drives to sleep or keep them spun up 24/7?

jimbob200521

jimbob200521

Diamond Member
Just something that'd been bouncing around my head lately as I look into my home server more. I use it for file storage and media streaming to devices around my house and currently have my drives set to go to sleep after 30 minutes. I know this is an age old question but what do you do? Leave them spun up 24/7 or allow them to go to sleep?
 
I think it puts more stress on the drive if you continually spin up/spin down the drive, so, I usually go for 24/7 for a storage server, assuming you have an active server.
 
Elixer said:
I think it puts more stress on the drive if you continually spin up/spin down the drive, so, I usually go for 24/7 for a storage server, assuming you have an active server.
Click to expand...

That's my general train of thought, as well. It doesn't take much to keep it spinning but to spin up and down would be more wear and tare, I'm wondering if inrush current (however high or low on a drive) would be worse for 'em. I wish I could do drive by drive power management where I set my most active media drive to spin down between x and x hours while my others could be set accordingly to usage rates.
 
starting and stopping puts more stress on HDDs than steady running.
 
I leave mine 24/7. They really don't use that much power, they're in a closet under the stairs of my house and are ventilated so heat isn't a concern. So far, some of my oldest drives are going on six-plus years of 24/7 use with happy SMART readings.
 
24/7. Having them turn on/off is bad for them, and also causes lag when you need to access data. I also raid all my drives so drives going to sleep would be very bad as it will basically be treated as failed. I learned that the hard way when I tried to use "green" drives for a raid array - had to write a script to do a recursive dir every few minutes and output to a file, then read that file, then delete it, to ensure the disk stays active.
 
I leave mine running 24/7. I have about 20 VMs on the array running at any one time so there's always *something* for them to do. No point in spinning them down in my use case.
 
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