Spin up and spin down *are* the highest stress points of failure ... I don't turn them on and off a lot for that reason. The external Seagate drives I use have automatic shutdown and park as well as auto startup when a drive request is made anyway, and do it efficiently with reasonable timeouts.
No, the reason to dismount, disconnect and unplug is a) prevent human error from mis-managing the archive and b) protect them against inadvertent system malfunction or power spikes as best possible. Hard drives in external enclosures with good power supply and cooling are remarkably reliable, in my experience. I have several now that are up to 12 years old and still working perfectly despite being used heavily, but their limited capacities make them mostly useless now ... Some of my larger *files* won't even fit on a 200M hard drive any more, and at one time that was enough for a quite respectable complete bootable system. Godfrey On Apr 22, 2007, at 2:20 AM, P. J. Alling wrote: > Spinning up and down is much worse for the bearings than continuous > spinning. > > AlexG wrote: >> Presumably so they aren't spinning for nothing, assuming they won't >> power down on thier own. >> >> MTBF for hard disks is reported to be greatly exagerated >> >> On 4/22/07, Maris V. Lidaka Sr. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >>> I like your idea, but why "Dismount, disconnect, and unplug the >>> drives when >>> not in use for backup."? -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
