* The read/write heads experience literally next to no wear while they are floating above the platters. They physically land onto shelves or onto landing zones on the platters themselves when turned off; landing and takeoff are by far the most wear the heads will suffer.
* Following on the above, in the worst case the read/write heads might be torn off during takeoff due to stiction.
* Bearings will last longer; they might also seize up if left stationary for too long. Likewise the drive motor.
* The rush of current when turning on is an electrical stressor, no matter how minimal.
The only reasons to turn your hard drives off are to save power, reduce noise, or transport them.
Counterpoints for each:
Heads don't suffer wear when parking. The armature does.
If the platters are not spinning fast enough, or the air density is too low: the heads will crash into the sides of the platters.
The main wear on platter bearings is vibration, it takes an extremely long time for the lube to "gum up." If its still a thing at all. I suspect it used to happen because they were petroleum distilate lubes. So, shorter chains would evaporate/sublimate leaving longer more viscous chains. Or straight polymerize.
With fully synthetic PAO oils, and other options they won't do that anymore.
What inrush? They're polyphase steppers. The only reason for inrush is that the engineers didn't think it'd affect lifetime.
Counter: turn your drives off, thebsaved power of 8 drives being off half the day easily totals $80 a year- enough to replace all but the highest capacities.
> Keep them running [...] Bearings will last longer; they might also seize up if left stationary for too long. Likewise the drive motor.
All HDD failures I've ever seen in person (5 across 3 decades), were bearing failures, in machine that were almost always on with drives spun up. It's difficult to know for sure without proper A-B comparisons, but I've never seen a bearing failure in a machine where drives were spun down automatically.
It also seems intuitive that for mechanical bearings the longer they are spun up the greater the wear and the greater the chance of failure.
I think I have lost half a dozen hard drives (and a couple DVD-RW drives) over the decades because they sat in a box for a couple years on a shelf (I recall that one recovered working with a higher amperage 12V supply, but only long enough to copy off most of the data)
> The only reasons to turn your hard drives off are to save power, reduce noise, or transport them.
One reason some of my drives get powered down 99+% of the time is that its a way to guard against the whole network getting cryptolockered. i have a weekly backup run by a script that powers up a pair of raid1 usb drives, does and incremental no-delete backup, then unmounts and powers them back down again. Even in a busy week theyre rarely running for more than an hour or two. I'd have to get unlucky enough to not have the powerup script detect being cryptolockered (it checks md5 hashes of a few "canary files") and powering up the bav=ckup drives anyway. I figure that's a worthwhile reason to spin them down weekly...
No, the only proper way to prevent attacks on the data thereof is to keep a backup that isn't readily accessible. Aka offline, whether that's literally turned off or just airgapped from the rest of the infrastructure.
how will they both encrypt your machines drive, and the NAS backup with snapshots on it, but yet not defeat the air gap? air gapping is not some magical technique that keeps you secure.
if you really want to protect yourself from crypto lock attacks, which seems odd for an individual to be concerned about (nobody extorts individuals for a few hundred dollars to get the keys, they extort businesses for many thousands of dollars) then you need write once media like MDISC or WORM tapes.
Yes - although it's worth bearing in mind the number of load/unload cycles a drive is rated for over its lifetime.
In the case of the IronWolf NAS drives in my home server, that's 600,000.
I spin the drives down after 20 minutes of no activity, which I feel is a good balance between having them be too thrashy and saving energy. After 3 years I'm at about 60,000 load unload cycles.
Keep them running.
Why?:
* The read/write heads experience literally next to no wear while they are floating above the platters. They physically land onto shelves or onto landing zones on the platters themselves when turned off; landing and takeoff are by far the most wear the heads will suffer.
* Following on the above, in the worst case the read/write heads might be torn off during takeoff due to stiction.
* Bearings will last longer; they might also seize up if left stationary for too long. Likewise the drive motor.
* The rush of current when turning on is an electrical stressor, no matter how minimal.
The only reasons to turn your hard drives off are to save power, reduce noise, or transport them.