Is it very "bad" to prevent drives from ever spinning down?

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Coldblackice

[H]ard|Gawd
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As my patience whittles down as I get older, more and more, it drives me absolutely batty when I need to interact with any number of my non-SSD drives, and they're all spun down, freezing the file managers for 10+ seconds, for each sleeping drive poll. Maybe today's just a bad day, but I just went into a frothy-mouthed rage, I'm so tired of it. lol

What are the consequences of preventing drives from ever spinning down? Would it signicanclyt shorten lifespan? Any chance it'd lead to higher probability of data failure?

I suppose on a laptop, having drives never spin down would be an accident waiting to happen -- the probability of a jolt or jarring bump would be too great (unless I'm confusing the technologies of spinning drives down and head-paring).
 
IMHO it's actually better to never spin them down.

The only reason people spin them down is for power savings.
 
Drives are rated for some number of spinups. Aggressively spinning down desktop drives can be bad. In that case 24/7 would be better. But spinning a desktop drive down once a day or something probably won't be noticeable. In either case 24/7 is arguably the safest.

Laptop drives rated for more spinups so it matters less. Unless your laptop is running unusually hot where hdd is just adding to problem, other than battery life, not going to hurt it to run 24/7.
 
Thanks. So by "spinning", I assume that means that the drive motor is permanently spinning the motor and platters at 7200rpm without any stopping? If so, what does the drive head do during this time (when spinning, but when no data is being read/written)?

I'm worried about a potentially greater risk of drive damage with constantly spinning drives, perhaps paving the way for a greater chance of inadvertent drive head crashing, like if the desktop was jarred/bumped (whereas with spun-down drives, the risk of head-crash would be theoretically lower). Any validity to this hypothetical concern?
 
Coldblackice said:
Thanks. So by "spinning", I assume that means that the drive motor is permanently spinning the motor and platters at 7200rpm without any stopping? If so, what does the drive head do during this time (when spinning, but when no data is being read/written)?

I'm worried about a potentially greater risk of drive damage with constantly spinning drives, perhaps paving the way for a greater chance of inadvertent drive head crashing, like if the desktop was jarred/bumped (whereas with spun-down drives, the risk of head-crash would be theoretically lower). Any validity to this hypothetical concern?
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It varies with each model and manufacturer of drives.

If you have any concern at all, then make backups of your data. It's more likely that your PSU will short out taking your drive with it than anything else.
 
I (a person who manages > 200 hard drives) believe spinning drives down after a few hours of inactivity to be good but spinning them down after 20 minutes to be bad.
 
drescherjm said:
I (a person who manages > 200 hard drives) believe spinning drives down after a few hours of inactivity to be good but spinning them down after 20 minutes to be bad.
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Definitely!


For personal use I aim for setting the delay to create an environment of 1-2 spinups per day.
 
Coldblackice said:
Thanks. So by "spinning", I assume that means that the drive motor is permanently spinning the motor and platters at 7200rpm without any stopping? If so, what does the drive head do during this time (when spinning, but when no data is being read/written)?

I'm worried about a potentially greater risk of drive damage with constantly spinning drives, perhaps paving the way for a greater chance of inadvertent drive head crashing, like if the desktop was jarred/bumped (whereas with spun-down drives, the risk of head-crash would be theoretically lower). Any validity to this hypothetical concern?
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No real concerns that i've ran into. I had one set of drives be on more or less 24/7 for the better part of 6-8 years or so. (maybe a handful of hours off due to power outages) Basically no damage and they were only retired due to their lack of storage space. (4x seagate 7200.10 750Gig drives)

far as the bumping goes, some drives park the heads on the disk vs. others park it off the disk so yeah, depending on the drive a spindown may pose no less risk.
 
staticlag said:
Definitely!


For personal use I aim for setting the delay to create an environment of 1-2 spinups per day.
Click to expand...

At home on the linux based HTPC I set my drives to automatically spin themselves down after around 5 hours of inactivity with the hdparm -S command

Code: 
    -S     Put the drive into idle (low-power) mode, and also set the standby (spindown) timeout for the drive.  This timeout value is used by the drive  to
              determine  how  long to wait (with no disk activity) before turning off the spindle motor to save power.  Under such circumstances, the drive may
              take as long as 30 seconds to respond to a subsequent disk access, though most drives are much quicker.  The encoding of  the  timeout  value  is
              somewhat  peculiar.   A  value of zero means "timeouts are disabled": the device will not automatically enter standby mode.  Values from 1 to 240
              specify multiples of 5 seconds, yielding timeouts from 5 seconds to 20 minutes.  Values from 241 to 251 specify from 1 to 11 units of 30 minutes,
              yielding  timeouts  from 30 minutes to 5.5 hours.  A value of 252 signifies a timeout of 21 minutes. A value of 253 sets a vendor-defined timeout
              period between 8 and 12 hours, and the value 254 is reserved.  255 is interpreted as 21 minutes plus 15 seconds.  Note that some older drives may
              have very different interpretations of these values.
 
my servers run 24/7 and the drives do not ever see enough inactivity to spin down no matter how long or short the timeout. i run a mix of desktop and 'enterprise' sata drives at home 'enterprise' sata and sas drives at work. i think the drives should never spin down but i also think there should be enough utilization for that to not be an issue, OR you need to find your 'server' a hobby.
 
The old school mentality was to have them spin all the way down, but I don't do it. It has never presented a problem for me.
 
back when i had 70+ drives at home, i ran spindowns all the time
power/heat savings made enough sense
+ i had proper indexing tools, drive was never brought online if someone just needed to clarify whats on it, they came up only on real datarequest ... and in those cases waiting 10-30s wasmt that bad
in the end i ended up with 2y+ old drives with less then 1k power_on_hours and ~900-1000 spinuptimes

question if use spindowns or go 24/7 is usualy answered with yr cooling and power draw capabilities

also todays drive wont drop dead or live longer if it will have 1k more or less spinuptimes
 
From my experience, drives rarely fail out of the blue while spinning, though it does happen. They mostly fail when spinning up, or minutes after being spun up cold.

I rather keep them spinning at all times. I even have a big UPS setup that can last for about 4 hours. I will be adding more capacity to it so it can last 8. We get a couple extended outages here per year because of the road construction.

For raid it's also VERY important to keep them spinning or they might be seen as failed.
 
From my experience, drives rarely fail out of the blue while spinning, though it does happen. They mostly fail when spinning up, or minutes after being spun up cold.
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I would say my experience has been the exact opposite of that. I mean for the 75 to 100 RMAs that I have executed in recent years the only drives that died around spinup were the ones that were DOA and that was less than 10. The rest died while being used. And mostly because of the drives inability to read back sectors that it wrote to the point that every single full disk write several dozen or more sectors were unable to then be read back. At that point I call a drive unusable and very easily get it to fail the manufacturer's SATA long verification. On top of this quite a few of these drives offlined (until the power was reset on the drive) trying recover the unreadable sectors making them again useless.
 
Spin ups are worst, I keep mine to 2x per day if possible.
My WHS server runs 24/7 without power down initiated by me, but it clearly does go in to pwer saving mode.
 
Is there any way to see how many times a HDD have spun down or up using Win7?
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This is one of the SMART attributes so a program like CrystalDiskInfo will tell you if you look at the raw data for Start/Stop count.
 
Over all, it doesn't much matter. You are unlikely to run your drives hard enough that either having them spin up and down or not is going to cause them to fail any time soon. I mean think about how long you actually keep drives.

In terms of running constantly though, they are fine. Think about all the servers that do just that. If it were a problem, well you'd know. Our central storage array at work as been running continuously for about 6 years (it has a generator circuit) and that's pretty well what you'd expect it to do.
 
Let them spin. Never had a problem, in fact they seem to last longer just spinning. I have a 6 year old500 GB WD blue chugging along still.

Here are some of my older drives in my media server. Seagate is 4.25 years run time, WD almost 4 years run time. Multiple Samsung's 2.5+ years run time.

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Interesting stuff. I run into the same problem of that pause while accessing my non-ssd's. After reading this thread I just went into the advanced power settings and changed the hard-drives from the default 20 minute non-use power down to 120 minutes.
 
sharknice said:
Interesting stuff. I run into the same problem of that pause while accessing my non-ssd's. After reading this thread I just went into the advanced power settings and changed the hard-drives from the default 20 minute non-use power down to 120 minutes.
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Did you have to do it in more than one place (for more than one drive)?

I took a similar measure, setting them to not spin down for 180 minutes. Strangely, however, I still get pauses when accessing drives that I haven't accessed in a while. I've made sure this new 180 minute setting was applied, and I've rebooted many times since then, but still get the same effect.

Any ideas? I've wondered if this perhaps has something to do with Windows scanning/searching for network drives before listing local drive content, or something similar.
 
Coldblackice said:
Did you have to do it in more than one place (for more than one drive)?

I took a similar measure, setting them to not spin down for 180 minutes. Strangely, however, I still get pauses when accessing drives that I haven't accessed in a while. I've made sure this new 180 minute setting was applied, and I've rebooted many times since then, but still get the same effect.

Any ideas? I've wondered if this perhaps has something to do with Windows scanning/searching for network drives before listing local drive content, or something similar.
Click to expand...

Is it possible your hard drives have internal head parking? Like the WD Green for example? They move the head from the platters, and there is a lag in moving the head over the platters after a period of inactivity!
 
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