Is spinning down disks a good idea in this case?

[oguruma]

I know the general consensus is that spinning down disks is ill-advised. I think for my specific use-case it might be better than leaving the disks spinning, but I am looking for some input.

This box is used just as a Plex media server.

It has an 8TB desktop Seagate for my movies, a 4TB WD Red for my music, and a 2TB WD Red which houses the system dataset and is used to hold downloads from my Transmission downloader.

The thing is that I only really use Plex every few days, often times just to watch a single movie.

Based on that, I think spinning down the 8TB and 4TB might make more sense that leaving them spinning...

Since I know somebody is going to ask, I have cold spares of these drives, and a set of offline backup external drives (one in my house and one I keep at my sister's place, with them being swapped out periodically).

 

[sretalla]

Be prepared for early replacement (as spin up/down costs you in drive life for NAS/server drives). If that makes financial sense to you , then fine.

 

[oguruma]

Be prepared for early replacement (as spin up/down costs you in drive life for NAS/server drives). If that makes financial sense to you , then fine.

Do you really think that spinning it up/down every couple of days will reduce the drive life more than it spinning 24/7? Note, I am talking, specifically, about drives that aren't even needed every day.

 

[sretalla]

Do you really think that spinning it up/down every couple of days will reduce the drive life more than it spinning 24/7?

That's the experience in the industry, yes.