jgreco
Resident Grinch
- Joined
- May 29, 2011
- Messages
- 18,680
LOL, modern hard drives no longer land the head on the platter when spinning down. Instead they rest the heads over the edge of the platter avoiding damaging them.
Hard drives haven't landed heads on platters for many years. Red herring.
LOL, modern hard drives no longer land the head on the platter when spinning down. Instead they rest the heads over the edge of the platter avoiding damaging them. They are designed for over 300,000 spin cycles.
No, they are /rated/ for over 300,000 spin cycles, but that does not mean they will survive 300,000 spin cycles or even half of that. The problem you are going to run into is that statistically, increased load cycle count correlates with a higher rate of failure in drives. This is bad for array operations. Additionally, you do not get staggered spinup when spindown is configured, so the PSU has to be able to endure the simultaneous spinup current for however many drives you have. This is generally not good. Finally, protocols such as iSCSI have short timeout values that can wreak havoc when an array appears to be nonresponsive.
Storage array vendors generally advise that spinning down an array shouldn't be done frequently, if at all. Perhaps it would be okay if you were only going to bring it online once a day for backups or something like that, but even there it is not advisable.
There are other risks that have been mitigated.
Oh yeah? What risks are those and how have they been mitigated? Curious professionals want to know.