A\u00a0friend asked about sleeping his drives “to extend their life.”<\/p>\n
Personally, my laptop uses SSDs, so drive energy is minimized. I have a tendency to leave it on all the time, popping the top when I need it, and closing it when I don’t. Therefore, sleep on that machine is in “manual mode.”<\/p>\n
My main computer is powered off at night and restarted in the morning. In that, sleep is set to “never”.<\/p>\n
I have an external SATA raid box, which powers up and down automatically with the machine. I also have a FirmTek external sata that I use as needed for some 20-ish removable drives. Obviously, those drives spin up as I insert them and down when I remove them.<\/p>\n
My own take is that spinning up and powering down, (that is, going from cold to hot to cold) is more wear and tear (in terms of time) than leaving a drive running at a constant temperature.<\/p>\n
How much more? \u00a0I have concluded that it’s about 25-30% of the expected life. That is, if you hot\/cold\/hot once a day (as I do powering off at night) a drive that would last about 4 years running full time will last about 4 years.<\/p>\n
HUH? \u00a0Well, remember that in my 24 hour day, that drive is off about 8 hours (at night): it’s total ON time is about 75% of the “always on” drive.<\/p>\n
This was once, years ago, confirmed with I spoke to a drive engineer about this very question directly. She said “Yes, and that’s why we can put a length on a warranty: it will be about the same whether the drive is running all the time, or turned on and off.”<\/p>\n
Where does the wear occur? \u00a0In the motor (it strains during spin up) and the drive bearings (microscopic cracks due to hot\/cold expansion of the material.)<\/p>\n
Upshot? \u00a0Pretty much like L-ion batteries. Don’t worry about it: the difference you’ll make with all that psychic energy isn’t really worth the mental strain.<\/p>\n
YMMV<\/p>\n
Tracy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A\u00a0friend asked about sleeping his drives “to extend their life.” Personally, my laptop uses SSDs, so drive energy is minimized. I have a tendency to leave it on all the time, popping the top when I need it, and closing it when I don’t. Therefore, sleep on that machine is in “manual mode.” My main […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mac-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/valleau.art\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/valleau.art\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/valleau.art\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valleau.art\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valleau.art\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=317"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/valleau.art\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":318,"href":"https:\/\/valleau.art\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317\/revisions\/318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/valleau.art\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valleau.art\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valleau.art\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}