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

[Bo Berglund]

On Wed, 16 Feb 2022 11:11:52 +0100, 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, if you let them run 24/7 they
>likely last for around 7 years. IOW to run the drives 24/7 is
>even better for the ecological footprint.

During 30-35 years of computing I have been using my systems for very long times
before moving on to the next computer. Like upgrading at 7-8 year intervals.

And I have never ever had a hard drive fail on me.

I have (for other reasons) tried my best to stop the operating system (Windows
mostly) from spinning down and parking the hard drives.

I even had to create a program that runs continuously and rewrites a text file
on the drive every 20 s when Microsoft removed the possibility of NOT using
"power save" on the drives.

And while doing this I have not seen a hdd failure at all.

So I can only concur with Ralf that at least constantly running drives are
mostly very reliable.

This is of course when using mechanical HDD devices, SSD is not covered by this
opinion. I know to little there...


-- 
Bo Berglund
Developer in Sweden