To Spin Down or Not To Spin Down

Is it healthier for the drive to NEVER let it spin down?

  • Yes

  • No

Results are only viewable after voting.
Fahrvergnuugen

Fahrvergnuugen

I am the law!
On april fools day, I had a hard drive failure. The drive was the original 30gb drive that came with my Dual 500MHz G4 which I have had since they first came out [and it's been on since I got it].

I have always had the drive spin down time set to like 30minutes in the engergy saver control panel. After the drive failure, a friend of mine told me that he doesn't let his drives spin down because he has had better luck with ones that never rest.

The question is, is it better to let the drives spin down in the energy saver control panel, or is it better to put this on "never"
 
Woo hoo! I am 100% of the poll results!

Ahem.


You're going to get a lot of opinion on this poll, because I really don't think that there are a lot of studies that can back up someone's point of view. On one hand, if you keep the drive up all the time, friction will eventually take its toll and the hard drive will stop spinning. On the other hand, it takes a lot of energy to start and stop drives spinning, and one of the worst things you can do to an electric motor is start it (it's fine once it's running). On the third hand :))) personal experience could be tainted by a bazillion other variables such as rotation speed of the drive, the OS used (in this case I mean that some OSs are more likely to cause disk thrashing), maintenance routines (defragging to reduce the amount of thrashing), et cetera.

So I voted no, because in my personal experience I have never had a hard drive failure (knock on any wood-like substance) and I spin down my drives.
 
Of my four machines which are always up, two have SCSI drives (one I believe is approaching three years old), and the other two IDE (including the Mac). The Mac is also a Dual 500, 40G, and has been running no problems since I bought it late 2000. The other IDE machine is OpenBSD (in a Compaq...) and has been running with that drive for at least 16 months.
So in my experience, always running works well. Which of course completely balances out nkuvu's experiences.
 
From what I gather, spinning disks up and down a lot is hard on them. I don't have any sources, nor do I even remember who said that (I think it was a systems guy att my school, but not sure), so take it for what it's worth.

In OS X, there is a lot of stuff that makes use of the disks whether you are near the computer or not (system logs get written whenever anything much happens network-wise, cron jobs get run regularly, etc.). I had my disks set to spin down, but they would constantly spin up and down, while the computer sat alone in the corner. Now I just let them spin all the time.
 
Of course servers don't spin down. They're expected to be ready for use at any time...

Since I am using dial-up, nothing network-wise happens unless I initiate it. And cron jobs only run once a day, so my HD is not spinning up and down like a yo-yo.

I'm interested to know if anyone has information about the power consumption of the HD alone. I am assuming that the people who don't spin down their drives still put their system to sleep. But how much power does a HD spinning consume? I know it's not as much power as it takes to spin up a drive.
 
I set just the monitor to sleep, but leave the computer wide awake and HDs spinning. I often connect to the ssh server when I'm at school, for one thing.

As for the power consumption - there is a noticeable effect on the power bill since I got the computer, something like 4-5 dollars a month.
 
I spin down every night and whenever I leave the house during the day. Your drive will eather get abused by leaving it on always or spinning it down regularly, so it's just like take your pick :D

My G3 iMac from 1999 is still doing fine for my brother and I let it spin down every night and during the days when I wasn't home. Never had any hard drive related problems there.

I think the major advantage of spinning down/sleeping it is power saving. It takes a lot of power to keep everything running, where as sleep takes next to none.
 
I was playing around with the energy settings in my iMac, and I decided to tell it never to sleep itself (because I leave it overnight to download AND IT SLEEPS HALFWAY THROUGH, the LCD turns off after 5 mins, and the HD never spins down. I just sleep it. HOWEVER, having said that, my parents are stupid and make me SHUT IT DOWN every time I'm finished! Because, "They payed for it, so it's not my computer." Yada yada yada ;)

MWA HA HA, when I buy my iBook MYSELF, I will have COMPLETE control *runs off screaming like a maniac* Bwa ha ha ha!
 
Originally posted by Hypernate
MWA HA HA, when I buy my iBook MYSELF, I will have COMPLETE control *runs off screaming like a maniac* Bwa ha ha ha!
Click to expand...

You'll probably want to shut off your iBook when you're done with it unless you'd like to cook an egg on it. :D
 
Yeah. Stupid G3 overheating ;) I'll be waiting for the G4 iBook (which is inevitably going to be made) and that will probably melt the casing ;)

Hey, btw, do the TiBook overheat faster than the IceBooks? And does Motorola make a specific laptop G series, or are the standard processors used? You know what I mean ;)

Like Intel makes the PIII for the PCs, and the PIII SpeedStep for the laptops.
 
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