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Keep External Hard Drives On?
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Senior User
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Los Angeles
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Offline
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Do you guys keep your External Hard Drives on the whole time? For now, I leave them on all the time just cuz i'm too lazy to remember to turn them off . . . . does that damage the harddrives?
Thanks!
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Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Oct 2002
Location: Washington, DC
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It depends on what you're doing with them. If you have an external drive just for backup purposes, then you don't really need it on any longer than it takes for you to back up your data. So, for example, if you back up weekly, then you only need to turn it on once a week. If you use an external drive for audio/video editing or some other day-to-day task, then leaving it on won't damage it any more than leaving your computer on all day would.
Will leaving a hard drive on all the time make it fail more quickly? Probably, as all mechanical devices will fail over time.
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"One ticket to Washington, please. I have a date with destiny."
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Posting Junkie
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Houston, TX
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Originally Posted by SpaceMonkey
Will leaving a hard drive on all the time make it fail more quickly? Probably, as all mechanical devices will fail over time.
Espically with the new fluid dynamic bearings, running at the same speed is no big deal. Much of the wear and tear on a drive is during the spin up/spin down.
Think about the last time you had a drive failure. Was it after the drive had been running for a few hours, or as soon as you turned it on?
I use my external drive about twice a week, and I leave it off in the meantime. But if you use your external drive a couple times a day, I think leaving it on is a good idea.
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Junior Member
Join Date: May 2005
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I have one drive thats USB that I only use to backup about once a month, so I turn that one off. I then have a Firewire drive that I use for music, that one stays on all the time. The Firewire harddrive used to be in a USB enclosure, but about 1/3 of time when the computer went to sleep it would disconnect the USB drive and I would have to turn off/on to get it to connect. Plus the USB drive would never sleep, so it was always way louder than the Mini. So I switched it to Firewire and all those problems are gone. After sleeping the Firewire drive wont show up in Finder, but it does show up on the Desktop and OSX knows its there.
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