I think a lot of the advice around keeping the drives running is about avoiding wear caused by spin downs and startups i.e. keeping the "Start Stop Cycles" low.
Theres a difference between spinning a drive up/down once or twice a day and spinning it down every 15 minutes or less.
Also WD Green drives are not recommended for NAS usage. I know in the past they used to park the read/write head every few seconds or so which is fine if data is being accessed infrequently but continuously however a server this can result in continuous wear which leads to premature failure.
Agree. I do weekly backups, the backup NAS is only switched on and off 52 times a year. After 5-6 years the disks are probably close to new in term of usage vs disks that have been running continuously over that same period.
Which leads to another strategy which is to swap the primary and the backup after 5 years to get a good 10y out of the two NAS.
I think I know what you are talking about. I don’t know if it made the green drive identical to a red but it turned on TLER so the green drives wouldn’t co tangly drop out of the raid array.
I’m running a 3 disk ZFS mirror of 8-10yr old greens and are yet to have an issues.
Theres a difference between spinning a drive up/down once or twice a day and spinning it down every 15 minutes or less.
Also WD Green drives are not recommended for NAS usage. I know in the past they used to park the read/write head every few seconds or so which is fine if data is being accessed infrequently but continuously however a server this can result in continuous wear which leads to premature failure.