Hard Drives: Always on or spin up/down as needed?

Posted by Terminal Frost on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Terminal Frost
Published on 2010-04-26T17:24:52Z Indexed on 2010/04/26 17:34 UTC
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hard-drive

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sleep

The specific application is a NAS that hosts media content and is frequently accessed during the day.

My NAS was probably cycling on and off around 5 times a day so I decided to not allow it to spin down. I'm thinking this will be better for the drive, but I am not sure.

I am wondering, however, if there is any concrete information out there as to what causes more detrimental wear on a hard disk: Spinning 24/7 or cycling on and off as needed?

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