I'm fed up with the 2-3 seconds of lag when accessing some of my HD because Windows 10 shut them down after X minutes of no use, so I disabled that option. Can it harm the HDs in question?
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Why do you think it may be a source of damage? How?– XavierjazzCommented Jan 1, 2017 at 19:14
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1Hard drives are powered down in some power plans to conserve power, not to increase the life of the drive. Many drives run 24/7 for years with no ill effects. It has been claimed by some that frequent drive power ups is more harmful than leaving them running.– LMiller7Commented Jan 1, 2017 at 19:36
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This will NOT harm your drives... whether you should or not is entirely up to your usage patterns and hardware involved, meaning a server, desktop, and laptop would all have different "optimum" settings. In a laptop, having the drive spin down when not accessed for 10-15 minutes can save battery, but you might just use Standby for the whole computer in that case too... In a desktop settings, it all depends how long it will go being powered on without being accessed, I leave town for days and keep my computer on 24/7 and I set this to 1 hour. On a server it is probably best to turn this off.– acejavelinCommented Jan 1, 2017 at 19:51
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@LMiller7 depends on type of drive. WD Green do not like to be in a NAS for some years, WD Red do not like to be turned on/off frequently.– OfflerCommented Jan 1, 2017 at 20:41
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1 Answer
No, it generally won't harm the hard drive. In enterprise environments where thousands of hard drives are deployed running 24/7, there is statistical and anecdotal evidence that turning hard drives on and off is harmful, largely because of mechanical stress and temperature variations:
https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/disk_failures.pdf
However, it's worth considering:
If the drive has head parking, and some software is occasionally accessing the drive, then it will wear out the drive by forcing it to constantly unpark the head.
If the platters are spinning and you move or bump the drive, that could cause damage.
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Shouldn't it depend on type of harddisc? Normally consumer harddiscs are made for multiple on/off periods (e.g. WD green). If you do this with a NAS drive (like the WD Red) they soon fail as they are build for long running times and not on/off switches. WD Green in a NAS fails more often as they are not build forthe long on periods like WD Reds. WD Reds fail in Servers with multiple drives because of vibrations and are not build for systems with more then a few drives. Cheatahs can be in servers with 16 drives and make no problems...– OfflerCommented Jan 1, 2017 at 20:40
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I've heard that before, but I haven't seen any concrete evidence that it's true. It's a nice assumption to make that each flavor has such specific catering for each usage, but in reality I doubt that it's anything beyond quality binning and firmware tweaks. But even if it were true, it wouldn't affect the answer to this question unless they used bearings/motors that failed quality tolerances.– davidtgqCommented Jan 1, 2017 at 20:51
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Oh, if you are in zyxel forums their nas ignored in the past to do seldom spinups which soon let WD Red fail. If you look at the smart values spinups for WD Red should be mmuch lwoer then for WD Green.– OfflerCommented Jan 2, 2017 at 12:44