# Do you let your HDD go to sleep during operation?



## xkm1948 (Dec 12, 2017)

I have found this to be quite a controversial topic. Lots of folks have told me to turn off the "Let HDD go to sleep after XX minutes" option in the Windows Power Option. While some other folks claim it is good for the HDD to leave it on. So what is your take on this pretty old topic? Do you let your mechanical drive go to sleep or not?


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## Rowsol (Dec 12, 2017)

I never really paid any mind to it.  I just checked and apparently it's set to 60 minutes.  It's a storage drive so it doesn't get much use as is, might as well let it sleep.

Edit: I restored defaults and apparently 20 minutes is default.  I guess many years ago I changed it, for some reason.


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## R-T-B (Dec 12, 2017)

Depends on how mobile the system is...  Or in other words, is it a notebook?  If it moves a lot, parking the head a lot makes sense in case it gets bumped.  It also saves power.

On Desktops, longevity benefits from not parking frequently, so turn it off.


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## natr0n (Dec 12, 2017)

I set power profile for drives to sleep after 3 mins no activity.

I have like 8+ mechanical drives.


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## Toothless (Dec 12, 2017)

Spinning drives are happy drives.


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## Mussels (Dec 12, 2017)

Yes, let it sleep - but on a high timer like 120 minutes.

With 15 external drives (that are normally turned off) the system hangs as drives power on is just unforgiveable, even being connected they can slow down an SSD based system


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## SnakeDoctor (Dec 12, 2017)

First thing i do on after a format or new O/S install is to disable sleep on Hdd and on all clients pcs


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## TheoneandonlyMrK (Dec 12, 2017)

Depends on use case imho, my machine has been on year's so only one of three drives needs to be on to me ,the rest can sleep.


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## P4-630 (Dec 12, 2017)

I have my 2.5" data HDD on my desktop set to do so. (since I'm not accessing it all day)


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## rtwjunkie (Dec 12, 2017)

I don't let it sleep normally, those startups are counted in SMART for a reason.  They are brutal on the HDD motor. I prefer longevity over better power savings.

If it is an HDD that is rarely accessed, then yeah, parking makes sense.


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## DRDNA (Dec 12, 2017)

^^^ Same here for me too.


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## _JP_ (Dec 12, 2017)

SSD - Set sleep to "never", otherwise TRIM might not happen that frequently (IIRC, commands are only sent to active drives). SSDs consume very close to zero when idle anyway.
HDD/SSHD - Depends on your scenario, laptops can benefit for power savings and some data survivability to vibration or falling enviroments, in desktops I don't really see the point, unless storage perfromance isn't what one would be looking for.


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## nhoughton (Dec 12, 2017)

So I let my drives sleep after about 30 minutes on my storage machine. I have an LSI Raid Controller with an array in Raid 10 for all critical data. Disks spin down only when inactive but the controller keeps them pretty busy!


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## Frick (Dec 12, 2017)

rtwjunkie said:


> I don't let it sleep, no those startups are counted in SMART for a reason.  They are brutal on the HDD motor. I prefer longevity over better power savings.



Define "longevity" in this case. My, although somewhat rarely accessed, HDDs have a few thousand starts after several years. The drives will fail for other reasons long before the motors give up. But as you said, that depends on how agressive the sleep state is. Didn't the WD Green drives of yonder have this problem?


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## SaltyFish (Dec 12, 2017)

Frick said:


> Define "longevity" in this case. My, although somewhat rarely accessed, HDDs have a few thousand starts after several years. The drives will fail for other reasons long before the motors give up. But as you said, that depends on how agressive the sleep state is. Didn't the WD Green drives of yonder have this problem?


Yes, they did. I'm pretty sure that's partly the reason WD folded their Green line onto their Blue line (the other being the latter was in an awkward middle position that WD hadn't been expanding in a while anyway). There exist programs to change the sleep timer if the head parking happens too often.

If you're accessing it rarely (wedding videos, tax documents, save files for uninstalled games, and the like that you won't have to touch again for the foreseeable future), it's not an issue. If you're accessing it semi-frequently (playing your music library or writing the chat logs of slower chat rooms) at a rate where the head parking gets triggered on and off often, it will be an issue. The usage frequency scenarios in between is where it gets tricky. To be on the safe side, increase the sleep timer.

I had a WD Green drive that lasted about six months when I used it to dump my CD and DVD collection to listen/watch it from there. Just because it wasn't being written often didn't save it from the semi-frequent accesses I subjected it to. My fault really; the constant head parking and unparking sounds were a giveaway that it was being hit too often relative to its sleep timer. Imagine if such a rate was more sustained like with files shared over a P2P network (BitTorrent, eMule, etc.). So, yeah, it really depends on your use case. But the default of 8 seconds(?) is too short for even light usage.


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## Regeneration (Dec 12, 2017)

I turn off HDD sleep mode on all my systems.

HDD sleep increases latency and slowly kills the drive (waking and sleeping often).

I prefer using global sleep (S1/S3) for the entire system after 30-45 minutes of inactivity.


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## rtwjunkie (Dec 12, 2017)

Frick said:


> Didn't the WD Green drives of yonder have this problem?


Yes, they were extremely aggressive with their sleep state, causing premature failure.


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## Regeneration (Dec 12, 2017)

I still have working WD Green drives on 2 systems.

With a small tool (WDIDLE3), its possible to disable the aggressive head parking feature, and save the drive from killing itself.


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## Tomgang (Dec 12, 2017)

Yes. I have no failed hardrive i can acuse sleep mode for. Still have a almost 9 year old WD caviar black 1 TB with 4270 start ups and almost 14000 hours power on and since its new it has al ways run with sleep mode on. I have had 4 harddrives failing over the years. 1 external got bad sectors it cut not replace with new ones acording til S.M.A.R.T and another WD caviar black 1 TB also with bad sectors after 3,5 year of use (but no problem with RMA it) and the last two is WD raptor 150 GB drives where bofh got unstable and dissapired from bios/windows about 8 years old and with 12000 hours on time.

But no failed drives directly from sleep mode and i have uses sleep mode since 2009.


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## HD64G (Dec 12, 2017)

I need some help here guys. Some wrote on previous posts that they leave some disks active at all times and allow some others to be deactivated after some time. How to separate their behaviour? I have a storage disk to all deactivation and the 2 main disks are needed to be active at all times.


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## Jetster (Dec 12, 2017)

How can it go to sleep during operation? 

My drives I leave at default settings. My NAS is forced not to sleep


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## xkm1948 (Dec 12, 2017)

Hmm, once again we are in a tie. 

Personally I turn off the sleep option for ALL of my hard drivers. I hate the long lag if I need to access some files when it was put on sleep.


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## John Naylor (Dec 12, 2017)

Haven't installed a HD in 7 years .... most boxes wind up with 1 or more SSDs and 1 or more SSHDs for data storage.  Couple of dozen SSHDs installed; newest is 2 years old, oldest is 7 no failures to date.  Most boxes here are on 24/7 and Sleep is set to 60 minutes.  Drives are designed for specific purposes and firmware designed accordingly.  When you use the wrong type of drive in a specific environment, that's the worse thing you can do for your drives.  In server situations, no sense using sleep .... similarly using a  consumer drive in a server environment, can lead to prenmature failure as the very features that make it a good consumer drive, make it a poor server drive.  In a consumer environment, independent of sleep the head parking feature may be employed which protects the drive from vibration when a desk is bumped  for example.  Drives are rated for between 250k and 500k parking cyccles and an a server environment, this can be used up in just 3 months.   At 250k, if the heads park 120 times a day, it would use yp 250k cycles in about 5.7 years.


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## Beastie (Dec 12, 2017)

IME WD green are fine if you use them for the intended purposes. I have two 4TB greens that I've been using for 3 or 4 years, no problems at all so far.


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## Jetster (Dec 13, 2017)

John Naylor said:


> Haven't installed a HD in 7 years .... most boxes wind up with 1 or more SSDs and 1 or more SSHDs for data storage.  Couple of dozen SSHDs installed; newest is 2 years old, oldest is 7 no failures to date.  Most boxes here are on 24/7 and Sleep is set to 60 minutes.  Drives are designed for specific purposes and firmware designed accordingly.  When you use the wrong type of drive in a specific environment, that's the worse thing you can do for your drives.  In server situations, no sense using sleep .... similarly using a  consumer drive in a server environment, can lead to prenmature failure as the very features that make it a good consumer drive, make it a poor server drive.  In a consumer environment, independent of sleep the head parking feature may be employed which protects the drive from vibration when a desk is bumped  for example.  Drives are rated for between 250k and 500k parking cyccles and an a server environment, this can be used up in just 3 months.   At 250k, if the heads park 120 times a day, it would use yp 250k cycles in about 5.7 years.



Yeah, so SSHD are hard drives and go to sleep. The just have considerately less hesitation when they come out of sleep state.


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## Mussels (Dec 13, 2017)

rtwjunkie said:


> Yes, they were extremely aggressive with their sleep state, causing premature failure.





Regeneration said:


> I still have working WD Green drives on 2 systems.
> 
> With a small tool (WDIDLE3), its possible to disable the aggressive head parking feature, and save the drive from killing itself.



the only WD green still working for me is the 24/7 one from my NAS, that i used WDIDLE3 on to fix that stupid timer - all the ones i left at stock have given smart errors or failed outright


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## Komshija (Dec 14, 2017)

My HDD's "sleep" only when I shut down my PC. The problem is that I have to access files on my HDD's far too often to let them sleep and than wake/restart. I think that such process is going to wear-out HDD much faster. I also never put my PC to sleep, but rather leave it running if I plan to return quickly (eg. in 1 hour) or shut it down if I'm going somewhere or won't return for at least 1,5 or more hours.


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