Does regularly powering Freenas off/on shorten hard drive life?

[wintermute000]

Question: Does powering off your Freenas regularly (off at night, on in morning) shorten your hardware lifespan / incur more errors? Assuming clean shutdowns of course.

 

[diedrichg]

Ah. The age old question. This has been going on for several decades. You will not get the answer you want because there are people who live in both camps. One side says stopping and starting a spinning disk shortens the life of the motor. The other side says keeping a motor running 24/7 shortens the life. This argument has gone on for so long that you will have both sides say that the other is completely wrong and that their way is the right way.

 

[mjws00]

Others will know more about how FreeNAS manages power than I do, I want availability and stability and that has a cost. You want to shut your desktop off at night, cool. I won't.

I view FreeNAS as a SERVER. Every sysadmin I know clenches when they have to reboot servers. Hell always begins with a reboot or a crash ;). Give it pure, clean, power and leave it alone. That said, I do have a specific set of drives that I leave offline until they are needed. If you ever get hit with an encryption bug or something nasty, offline storage can save you hours and hours. That is a compromise for a specific purpose.

Guess I'm firmly in the leave em spinning camp. Even my desktop reboots only a handful of times a year. My laptop goes to sleep, but she's SSD. I'm fine with spinning them slower, slowing clock speeds, blacking out lcd's. They seem to be doing OK with the Green drives stopping and parking, but even there we have a failure mode with restrictions and they watch the counts.

As diedrichg says, the debate is decades old. On the server side, there is no debate imho. It comes down to how you view and use your installation.

Good Luck,

Mike

 

[cyberjock]

What diedrichg said. I've argued this to death and not about to discuss it again. Feel free to avail yourself of the search tool if you want to read the legendary discussions on the topic.

 

[wintermute000]

Cheers. I think it's a case of pennywise and pound foolish from the looks of things given how much these big drives cost. Thanks for the pointers

Sent from my LG-D802T using Tapatalk

 

[TXAG26]

I've always had the understanding that it is the constant heating and cooling cycles that eventually do-in electronics, motors, and a lot of other stuff. Integrated circuits expand and contract as they heat and cool, same with metal and other things in the HDD motor. How many cycles these parts can withstand before failure? Who knows, probably 10's or maybe 100's of thousands, depending on the delta between how hot the part gets and how cool of a temp it returns to.

In the real world, will this cause your system to crash or become flaky over a long period of time? Who knows, but, I leave my stuff spun-up and running 24/7.