Spin down discs

[Liam Proven]

On 25 June 2014 23:29, Colin Law <clanlaw at gmail.com> wrote:
> I believe, though I cannot point to any specific references, that it
> is considered better to keep discs spinning rather than winding them
> down, possibly for exactly the reasons you mention.


Opinions vary and it depends on role.

But if you dig deep into the SATA status data that various Linux tools
can return, you can find a count of "load/unload cycles" -- how many
times the drive has started and stopped -- and "operation hours" (or
words to that effect) -- how long it's been on and spinning for.

Different use cases suggest different strategies.

For some roles, where instant high performance is needed, the drives
are kept spinning all the time. But in time they will burn out.

Today, as energy conservation becomes more important, it's more common
to use either onboard or system-controlled power management and spin
down idle drives, while still keeping them online, powered up and
ready to come back to life -- but this takes a significant fraction of
a second, an æon in computer terms.

The fact that power-management spins drives up and down on its own
does strongly suggest that the camp that feel that this does /not/
prematurely shorten drive life has mostly won the argument now,
though.


-- 
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