Is constant operation bad for hard drives?

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rujoesmith

rujoesmith

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Jun 27, 2010
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I have a raspberry pi setup as a fileserver which is running basically 24/7. The filesystem has been transferred to the usb hard drive (wd passport) so it is constantly spinning.

Will constant operation of the hard drive kill it faster than turning it off every night? I've googled around a bit but cant find a good answer about which is worse, constant operation or spin up/spin down cycles.
 
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scuzzycard
Running constantly is actually better than frequently stopping and starting for any hard drive. Constant running and constant operation are two different things. Any hard drive short of an SAS enterprise drive is likely to fail if it's constantly reading and writing data 24/7. It doesn't sound like that was your question, however.
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scuzzycard

scuzzycard

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Running constantly is actually better than frequently stopping and starting for any hard drive. Constant running and constant operation are two different things. Any hard drive short of an SAS enterprise drive is likely to fail if it's constantly reading and writing data 24/7. It doesn't sound like that was your question, however.
 
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rujoesmith

rujoesmith

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Well to be honest im not sure if its constantly reading/writing. I transferred the filesystem to the hard drive to lighten the load on the sd card, maybe I should post in a linux forum to see if the operating system is constantly reading/writing small piece of data. Anyway thanks for the info!
 
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LinwoodFerguson

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If you've got enough memory, move /tmpfs to ram, set /var/log to /tmp, get rid of the swap file. You can dramatically reduce IO in linux with these kind of steps, I do that on Pi's that sit and do things like control lighting so they aren't wearing out the SD card for no reason logging every few seconds. There are special considerations to this documented in various linux versions (e.g. if you need apache2 running it needs the log folder pre-created after /tmp comes up since it always comes up empty, at least as of a couple years ago it did).

I'm not sure how relevant that is to a drive spinning all the time though.
 
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