I am planning to move my backups to an external USB drive, the reason being that the backups are using about 90% of my home server's space and I am not able to obtain a hard drive larger than 85 GB (there are 6 on the server right now running on RAID 5).
However, I have kept the external drive unplugged and sitting on my desk in fear that plugging it into the AC will spin up the drive and cause wear, even if it's not necessarily connected to USB.
If I connect my external drive to the AC, is it true that the drive will spin up and decrease its longetivity? If not, can I just plug it into my server's USB port and set the drive offline until it is needed?