Actually you are probably better off leaving it on all the time. I have read quite a bit of information that leads to the conclusion that the electronics in the drive are far more often the failure mechanism than the mechanical parts. The prime failure mechanism for the electronics is power on/off rather than just operational hours. So keeping the electronics always powered up is usually the best way to achieve longevity.
Even if the electronics are on all the time, there is the disks themselves. Bearings and such wear out with hours spinning, but starting a drive spinning puts a lot of extra stress on a bearing. The result is that the best recipe for long life seems to be: keep the electronics always powered up, spin down the platters when inactive for a fairly long period. Thus if the disk is not used for many hours at a time the platters stop, but they don't continuously stop and start. This behavior is usually built into external drives. All this is assuming the disks stay cool. The temperature inside the disk itself is a prime factor in longevity. A hot disk will die much faster than a cool one. If your external drive enclosure keeps the disk hot even when the platters spin down, then unplugging it when not in use might be the best option. The trend in recent years has been to build drives that use a lot less power (hence stay cooler) so very hot drives are less of an issue. Also the type of drive has a lot to do with it. An external drive that uses a laptop type drive will generally run much cooler than one built around a high performance desktop drive. Now all this has just been about the drives themselves. There is a BIG reason to never turn your drives off when using them directly with the Touch: each time a drive turns on the server in the Touch will do a scan which takes time, AND is the most error prone part of its operation. Cutting down on the number of times you have to do a scan on the Touch is a very good thing. So all in all I think BY FAR your best bet is to leave the drive and Touch on all the time. John S. -- JohnSwenson ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JohnSwenson's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5974 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=89707 _______________________________________________ Touch mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/touch
