In 41 years of running / building / programming / repairing computer systems, it is my opinion that traditional (spinning platter) hard disks seem to last longer when left "on" continuously.
Perhaps this is just me, but I've had a dozen or so disks fail, and seen many more, which were all in power-cycled or sleep applications. I think it is the thermal stress - heating / cooling causing expansion / contraction - which contributes to premature failure.
In one machine I have two 80GB SATA server disks (bought when SATA disks were just catching on) in a RAID0 stripe. It's probably comparable to a modern disk in terms of speed, so nothing special, but it was really nice back then. And it has been running (in several machines) ever since... for 20+ years. It is never shut off, and the disk temperatures are always controlled. I keep them running now as a "downloads" drive, just to see how long they will last.
I'm hopeful that the (modern, expensive) disks in my TNAS fare as well. So I set the TNAS disks to never sleep, and set the fan to Medium, and that seems to (now) keep things evenly cool under tested conditions. But I would personally like more control of the fan settings, such as "keep disks at 30°C always."
Of course, it will cost electricity to run that disk. I estimate that one (spinning platter) hard disk, active 5% of the time, will produce about 5.6W of waste heat. From an 80% efficient power supply, that means 7W from the outlet. Times 24h, times 7 days, times 52 weeks = 61kWh of electricity per year. If each kWh costs $0.10, that's $6.10 per year to operate that disk continuously. Which would be nice to reduce. Except that, either way - after a few years (power cycle) and cost of new disk, or many years (continuous) and the extra electricity - the total expense will end up about the same. That's why I choose continuous operation: longer data retention and less work for the operator, but higher electricity bill.
Best wishes.
F4-220 FW 4.2.18 no HDD sleep
Re: F4-220 FW 4.2.18 no HDD sleep
My F5-422 never goes to sleep either.
Only use this for casual data storage and Time Machine and the thing is noisy as hell!
Would be great if it did go to sleep!
Only use this for casual data storage and Time Machine and the thing is noisy as hell!
Would be great if it did go to sleep!
Re: F4-220 FW 4.2.18 no HDD sleep
the only way to make the hard drives sleep is to put the fan on low
Re: F4-220 FW 4.2.18 no HDD sleep
Great, this helps! However, HDD temperature has to be monitored until a real fix has been published.
BTW: 30 Watts difference may seem to be not much, but with 24/7 this sums up to 260 kWh, which is not cheap, at least here in Germany
FYI: 1 kWh costs about $0.40
Re: F4-220 FW 4.2.18 no HDD sleep
4.2.15 seemed to fix my sleep issues. I just double-checked the logs and they're definitely going into sleep mode looking at the numbers.
I haven't tried doing so yet but just curious, can we go back to an older TOS if the latest one doesn't work correctly???
I haven't tried doing so yet but just curious, can we go back to an older TOS if the latest one doesn't work correctly???
Re: F4-220 FW 4.2.18 no HDD sleep
{L_BUTTON_AT}FO876
Hi! You can only go back to the old version by reinstalling the TOS.
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Technical team: support(at)terra-master.com (for technical support)
Service team: service(at)terra-master.com (for purchasing, return, replacement, RMA service)
Re: F4-220 FW 4.2.18 no HDD sleep
Hi,
HDDs not sleeping again after updating to 4.2.28 + Patch 1.31!
No matter what is configured either fixed fan speed (low | medium | high) or automatic which was working until 4.1.18, HDDs do not enter sleep mode.
HDDs not sleeping again after updating to 4.2.28 + Patch 1.31!
No matter what is configured either fixed fan speed (low | medium | high) or automatic which was working until 4.1.18, HDDs do not enter sleep mode.