[Aegis]

I have a couple external firewire HDs that spin down after 15 minutes of being idle. I use them quite often so there's probably 3-4 cycles of spinning down/up each day.

So my question is this: is it better for HD longevity to let them run all the time or let them spin down when not in use? Thanks!

[ghporter]

The difference (if any) would be infinitesimal. Somehow, people have perpetuated the idea that modern hardware has all the same problems and failings of stuff from 20 years ago. Hard drives are sometimes rated in hundreds of thousands of hours MTBF. Spin it all the time, spin it just a few seconds at a time, no problems. You might want to adjust the time delay for spin down to a slightly longer time-say 20-30 minutes-which would possibly reduce the wait time for some of your accesses. But I wouldn't worry about it.

[Sherman Homan]

Many hard drives are rated at 500,000 hours Mean Time Between Failures. That is 57 years! Of course your brand new drive will fail in 57 minutes with all of your precious data if you don't have a backup plan...

[Aegis]

Yep, everything is backed up. I just wasn't sure if the repeated idling was hard on a drive; I'm used to running them all the time.