> > I been wondering about this. The other day I found a menu in windows where > I > could make my hard drives go to sleep when I'm not using them. I have a > 500 > gig hard drive in my computer that runs all the time but I only use it > when I > backup my photo-folders. Will sleep mode make it last longer? > Probably. There's a tradeoff, spinning wears the disk (rather slowly; look at the estimated lifespan for modern disks!), but starting the disk spinning is a lot of extra wear. So it depends how many starts vs. how many hours of spinning. And the exact numbers for any given drive aren't really known and aren't available even as estimates. Powering a system down (well, it's more the powering it *up* step) has an even bigger impact. Again, sitting vs. starting tradeoff, with the numbers not known. 20 years ago it was pretty clearly better to leave a system running for 24 hours rather than subject it to one extra power cycle. I'd expect that period of time to have been reduced since then, but haven't seen recent estimates. -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
