Spindown and durability for a rarely-active server

[LeftyAce]

Hi all,

I've been reading up on automatic spindown settings, and of course have learned that spinning harddrives up and down frequently shortens their life. How much is "too frequently"?
I'm setting up a server whose only purpose will be daily backups of another server, so unless FreeNAS does something to wake up the harddrives, they will only be activated once every 24 hours.

Here's the kicker: I don't care about power usage, and the drives are in a rackmount case with obnoxious fans in a climate-controlled room, so temperature isn't a major concern either. My motivation for spindown was the thought that if the drives are essentially "off" for 22 hours of every day they will last longer than if they're on and spinning. Is that right? Or should I just leave them on? Any other thoughts on this scheme?

Thanks in advance,

-Lefty

 

[cyberjock]

WOW. Expect every combination of possible answers from "never spin them down" to "it doesn't affect their lifespan at all". Personally, I never spindown my hard drives...ever. I have 22 drives in 1 server that have been running nonstop for 4 years.. 1 failure. I have had desktops where I shut them down every day before bed and I could expect to RMA the drive before the warranty is up.

But the other question is, if I spindown the drives once a day and that affect the lifespan of the drives, will you still save money in the long run despite the cost of shipping a hard drive?

From my personal experience(and I believe protosd said the same thing) I've seen that leaving them on 24x7 seems to give the longest lifespan despite the thought that spinning down a disk when not in use is "good" to prevent long term wear.

So what do I do? I shutdown my server if I'm going on vacation out of town for more than a weekend(I definitely don't want an email telling me my drive failed and I'm in a different state), otherwise they are on and spinning all the time. I think my 4 year old server has been shut down 5-6 times(once for a tornado that ripped the power poles behind my house out of the ground) since I built it and got it setup exactly how I wanted it.

 

[LeftyAce]

Okey doke, sounds like I'll just leave them running, especially since I pay a flat rate for rack space but NOT for power. Plus it looks like if I don't pay attention to firmware etc I could end up with weird problems on some drives when trying to spin down on idle.