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In 2024, do you let your computer go to sleep or not ?
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DiTBho:

--- Quote from: tom66 on January 08, 2024, 12:39:21 pm ---Is motor failure of HDDs a realistic risk?  It's my understanding HDD failures typically occur for a few reasons:

a) Head touches disk surface due to excessive vibration/physical shock/bearing failure;
b) Too many sectors become irretrievable, leading to breakdown of the filesystem, possibly due to (a);
c) Disk controller failure for unknown reasons, ESD/power supply issues, random silicon death etc.

I haven't heard of motors failing.  Typically, one would expect a brushless motor to survive hundreds of thousands of hours.  The bearing is a risk, but I think it should be well established now how to make these bearings last a very long time given the precision elsewhere used in hard drive manufacture.

Spinup/spindown shouldn't correlate strongly with HDD life in "normal" applications (shutting down disks on idle) IMO.

--- End quote ---

Yup, exactly as I have already written something detailed in two topics here on this forum and have been ignored  :o
Psi:
Motor failure is the motor driver IC, rather than the motor itself.  The motors do die, but motor controller death is far more common.



--- Quote from: PlainName on January 08, 2024, 08:42:13 am ---
--- Quote from: Psi on January 08, 2024, 05:43:07 am ---With spinning disks it's best (for longevity) to leave them spinning rather than letting them power down and up on activity + timeout.
The starting/stopping is what wears the motor and bearings, and the thermal cycling isn't good on other parts either.

--- End quote ---

Not disputing that but do you have a reference for it? A simple thought experiment suggests it isn't true for all cases (5 mins run time every 20 years, for example) so there should be some point where best practice changes from turning off to leaving it on.

--- End quote ---

That is true,  but in a typical use case when you have the feature enabled you end up with many more on/off cycles than you would have had with the feature off.
Perhaps i should have added "for a typical use case" to my previous comment.
There is also the annoyance of the ~2 second delay when you click on the drive in windows explorer and it locks up waiting for the drive to finish starting and become available for access.

Sorry I dont have any reference, 
PlainName:
Aren't most things prone to failure when powered up? So not turning them off makes sense on that basis.

But... electrolytics don't have a finite life, so leaving them on may wear them out. And, probably, any issue with those would be noticeable when starting up whereas the same fault wouldn't cause a shut down once working. Similarly, disks may be borked but limping along, and it's only when you try to cold start them that they actually show how bad it is. So perhaps it's not that clear at all.
rdl:
With spinning disk drives, how long they last is surely related to how they are used. I have a server for archival purposes, it can be days between times when it is accessed. Sometimes even as long as a month. There is no way I can believe that leaving the drives running constantly will make them last longer than if they are shut down when not needed.
mcarp:
5 computers on 24/7, 2 of them since 2008.  those 2008 machines have both had 2 psu replacements.  laptop had a wall wart replacement, its but up for about 10 years. battery died, not replaced.  2 i7s just installed christmas of 2022. no drive or other components have gone bad except for 1 network adapter built in got flakey and i put in an expansion card to replace that one. also on 24/7 for the past 25 years a theater 5.1 channel amplifier and speakers. oh, i had 2 17 inch very very old acer monitors that went bad, caps replaced, both went bad again, but those were whew, er, before the 2008 computers.
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