Here we're talking about 2 separate cases, electrical and mechanical.
In electrical componentry, it's power up/power down that compromises the
reliability of a part (circuit). This is primarily due to heat - it's
the
temperature cycling in the circuit components thats the bad guy.
In Mechanical parts, it's also temperature - cold running of close
tolerance parts wear much faster than when they're at normal (design)
temperatures. But it's also a function of load - in high power mechanics
such as ar engines it will be a real issue, but not so in micropower
devices such as a hard disk.
paulm
On 25/12/2009, at 12:17 PM, frantisek holop wrote:
hmm, on Fri, Dec 25, 2009 at 10:16:28AM +1300, Paul M said that
I wouldn't think that spinning up frequently would shorten
it's life any more than if it stayed spinning. It may be very
irritating from a performance point of view though.
i am no hard disk expert, but i was taught at school that
the starting part of a usage curve has a much bigger wear
on the parts than steady operation. this is at least true
for a great number of electric parts.
i'd be more than happy to change the sleep timer to a value
with some common sense, like 4-5 minutes. it is most annoying
when you view some files but linger in one of them more
than 10s and in pretty much all the other use cases one can
imagine. i find my 3.5" external drive's 10 minutes an
excellent choice (this one's a 2.5").
Try a different usb enclosure.
this is not an option this time.
-f
--
what, me ambivalent? well, yes and no.
