Power management and drive lifespan

[Modelworks]

Does anyone know of any test that have determined how power up and down of drives effects the lifespan of the drive ? I know drives are rated for around 50,000 start/stop cycles but it isn't something that is linear where suddenly at 50,001 it fails. The other side is that leaving it powered uses more power and generates heat, though heat shouldn't be a factor if they are not overheated.

I ask because for years I have always kept my drives powered in systems. I never use power management on them and I have only had 2 drive failures in the past 10 years. It would seem to me that leaving the platter spinning and the drive idle would be a lot less stressful than spinning it up, moving the head, and powering it down, parking the head, several times a day. There is also much more current draw through the board and motor when spinning up.

Opinions ?

 

[nerp]

Today, it boils down to user preference. Statistically, the difference in drive lifespan between powering up/down and leaving up 24/7 is not measurable enough to make it important.

 

[alaricljs]

I have run 8 drives in one of my systems for 3+ years with somewhat aggressive power management. The one remaining drive (others were sold after upgrading) has been on 220 days out of that time and has been spun up 1548 times. Only 80 of those 1548 times were from power cycling. My spin-down time is set to 20 minutes of inactivity.

If you had asked last month I could have given you data on 6 more of those drives, might have been interesting then. The statistics would be much the same. Again, none of them had any issues.

I have major doubts that a "normal" user would ever experience failure on a drive because it got spun up too many times. That one drive I have data on was serving media to multiple users on multiple systems. Sometimes it would be spun up 5 or more times in a day, sometimes not at all for a week or more especially during vacations.

 

[Russwinters]

Most/many modern HDD use Ramp loading technology now, where the heads are unloaded onto a ramp off of the platters, because of this it is "more gentle" to the heads over the course of time, and increases the number of loads/unloads that the drive can perform.

Basically, power saving modes "Shouldnt" decrease the life of your drive by any measurable amount

 

[Modelworks]

Thanks for all the replies. I have always been curious about that.
I probably won't start using them in power management for now, not because of fear of wear and tear, I think you all are probably right. More because I never know what drive I may use next and I hate waiting for the spin up to get the data. Especially when it is serving to my home media players.

 

[C1]

Interesting as I use power management to keep the number of hours off my HDDs. After all, isnt the main spec. MTBF given in hours. In addition, my machines are constantly being shut down & booted three or four times a day. I have four drives & none of them has failed in over seven years.

So use the power management options to not only save power & reduce heating, but to also keep the number of spindle hours for the drives to a minimum unless you cant stand the delays resulting from wake/spin up.