Power down disk drive or not - when used two or three times per day

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Wed, 16 Feb 2022 10:47:14 +0000, Colin Law wrote:
>On Wed, 16 Feb 2022 at 10:13, Ralf Mardorf via ubuntu-users
><ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com> wrote:
>> ...
>> in my experiences 3 times parking and spinning up a day and your HDDs
>> will likely die after around 2 years  
>
>Does that mean that for my four year old laptop, which I suspend maybe
>a dozen times a day, you think the HDD should have died about 3.5
>years ago?

No, it does mean that my 3,5", 7200 U/min, CMR, IDE and SATA drives
usually died after around 2 years when turning computers on and of 3
times a day and they last for around 7 years, when running the computer
more or less 24/7, mainly for hard disk recording and/or MIDI
sequencers, IOW tons of short files, earlier on reiser and later on ext
file systems. Hence the term "in my experiences", since this is what I
have experienced again and again. I've never done comparative studies
and I e.g. own a 42 MB or 45 MB SCSI drive, that was turned on and off
innumerable times for probably 20 or even more years and likely will
spin up still today. There are probably several factors making a
difference. It still is likely representative, that turning on and of
does stress hardware a lot and especially parking and releasing the
heads is an issue or for early C64's floppy drives without a light
barrier, the bump to "adjust" the head's position.