2009/12/25 Paul M <l...@no-tek.com>: > 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.
Highest current is drawn at spin up and therefore highest load on the motor and supporting components. In addition, spin up and down causes head load and unload cycles in modern drives, which vendors quote a given number before failure. Checking a random Seagate drive, I see 300,000 cycles quoted and 34 Watts to spin up versus 5 Watts to idle. For arguements sake, if Frantisek's drive had similar load/unload limits and sleeps for 10S and works for 10S constantly, with that qouted value it could be expected to last less than 70 days. 26 times less than the warrantee of this Seagate drive.
