I have a TrueNAS backup server setup and it’s been running great for months now. I have it startup at 12am run the replication task and shutdown after. My question is, is having the hard drives startup, run for an hour then shutdown bad for the hard drives? Does starting then shutting them down everyday shorten their life? Or should I keep them running all the time?
I’ve had hard drives running for years with little failure rate. I use the seagate constellation drives.
There is a lot more stress put on the motors spinning the drives up and down but I am not sure anyone has done a controlled study on that to know if how much effect that has on the life of the drive.