Turn off hard disks: After 1 Hour <~~~Good or Bad???

[SOSTrooper]

Ok I have an IBM 60GB 7200RPM (I do not know the exact model... too lazy to unscrew HD and look hehe ) which I bought just last week. I run my PC 24/7 and was wondering if its a good idea to power down the hard drive after certain amount of time to let it rest when I'm sleeping or away from home? Will it have a higher risk of going bad when powering HD on and off often? Or the risk is higher if I just leave it on 24/7? TIA

 

[bigboxes]

I hear that officially this hd has limits of 333 power-on hours/month. That is about 11 hrs/day. Not too good. I leave mine on for days at a time and have two 60G IBMs. Had a previous 60G IBM crash after only 9 mos. (I used to shut it down frequently) and I lost some important data. If I could do it again, I would have made more frequent backups and if I could afford it, run multiple drives in a RAID configuration. The IBMs may not be all bad, and they are fast, inexpensive and very quiet. Hope I don't need the warranty again.

 

[docgonzo]

hmmm. I also power down my maxtors after 6 hours of inactivity. I think it is a fairly "natural" sleep mode. My last hard drive was a WD and I killed it by using the SLEEP option on my keyboard, which I think shuts down the Mobo? My HD went to sleep and never woke up. Could not even reformat the HD after that, inexplicabaly corrupted some file in the boot sector and after that all attempts to reformat the disk failed in one form of error or another. I put it in another computer and tried to format from there, and I could not boot that computer becuse it could not initialize the new HD. So I ate that one...

Long story short, I dont use the "sleep/coma/death" button anymore. Its much more natural to just power down the harddrives, which I think is pretty safe. I have had no problems since then anyways.

 

[CurtOien]

My hard drives are set to never shut off and I have never had one fail.

 

[Ausm]

I think sleep mode is a pain in the ass I never use it


Ausm

 

[Derango]

<< I think sleep mode is a pain in the ass I never use it


Ausm >>



yea..the only place that sleep and hybernate are useful, IMHO, is on a laptop.

 

[Chipster]

I was thinking about this the other day and was going to change the settings on my drives to turn off after a certain amount of time but changed my mind figuring why mess with it if I havn't had any HD failures in years leaving them always on.

 

[Flyingcool]

I don't see that being bad, maybe 5mins

 

[dullard]

Sleep and other hybernate modes were made for laptops only. They have been throughly tested with laptops only. Sounds like you are not using a laptop.

There is no reason to leave the computer on 24/7 unless you are actually using it 24/7 (which almost always requires the HD to be running). So either leave them running or shut the comptuer off. Your parts will last longer and you will have fewer problems. Docgonzo is a perfect example of someone using a laptop function on a desktop without full testing.

 

[Fun Guy]

Well, it's really a toss-up as far as what's worse or better. It depends on your poison (choice as far as risk).

If you allow the HDD to turn off after a certain amount of time, it won't be spinning as often. If you are of the belief that a drive has only a certain amount of 'spins' in it before it dies, you might want to enable this feature - have it turn off automatically after a certain amount of time.

On the other hand, spinning up and spinning down causes heating up and cooling down. This causes components to swell and shrink, respectively, which can affect longevity (especially moving parts). If you are of the school that certain components only have a certain amount of 'swells and shrinks' before they die, you might want to keep your drive on all the time.

Me, I keep my computers on 24/7 until I take them out back and shoot them.

 

[ElFenix]

24/7 here