Windows NAS, keep disk's spinning or put to sleep after X minutes of inactivity?

[DamirB]

I've just built a home server mainly used for media streaming and having our files backed up.
In pursuit of power efficiency (both for the bill and the planet) I've managed to get Idle power consumption to 23/21 watts at idle without giving in on performance when needed. One of the things I've done to achieve this is letting Windows put the drives to sleep after 20 minutes of inactivity. The Red's aren't always used, some days they won't even be used at all whilst at other moments maybe a few times. 

 

My question is if I should keep the drives running 24/7 because it's better for them or to keep my current settings? I've seen so many contradictory opinions out there.

 

Another interesting thing is that when I'm copying large files (let's say 50GB total) over the network to the server (i've got shared folder accessed on other pc's using \\PCNAME\FolderX) I will often get the message that not enough storage is free, when there clearly is more than enough.

 

 

• i5 10400 (Boxed cooler)
• Gigabyte B560M Aorus Pro
• 2x WD Red Plus, 4TB WD40EFZX + 2 external WD USB drives (these are mostly used to media streaming unless I play my BluRay's)
• Corsair Vengeance LPX CMK16GX4M2E3200C16 (two DIMM's)
• be quiet silent base 601
• Corsair RM550x 2018
• Samsung PM9A1 256GB SSD 
• Windows 11 Pro

[LionSpeck]

Just now, DamirB said:

I've just built a home server mainly used for media streaming and having our files backed up.
In pursuit of power efficiency (both for the bill and the planet) I've managed to get Idle power consumption to 23/21 watts at idle without giving in on performance when needed. One of the things I've done to achieve this is letting Windows put the drives to sleep after 20 minutes of inactivity. The Red's aren't always used, some days they won't even be used at all whilst at other moments maybe a few times. 

 

My question is if I should keep the drives running 24/7 because it's better for them or to keep my current settings? I've seen so many contradictory opinions out there.

 

 

• i5 10400 (Boxed cooler)
• Gigabyte B560M Aorus Pro
• 2x WD Red Plus, 4TB WD40EFZX + 2 external WD USB drives (these are mostly used to media streaming unless I play my BluRay's)
• Corsair Vengeance LPX CMK16GX4M2E3200C16 (two DIMM's)
• be quiet silent base 601
• Corsair RM550x 2018
• Samsung PM9A1 256GB SSD 
• Windows 11 Pro

Well, there's many contradicting opinions on the matter, because no one really has good empirical data on this. Some say that spinning up the disks is what causes drives to fail, but others say that's just the moment you find out the drive has failed, and the lifespan isn't related to spin-ups.
As a general rule, WD Reds (as other NAS HDDs and enterprise / server drives) are built for 24/7 operation, and have firmware optimizations for that kind of usage. They're also not trying to be power efficient.

Take this information and make your choice; personally, I wouldn't worry too much about spin-ups, especially since, as you said, there's days the disks are not even accessed. I would put them to sleep, if power efficiency is really important. If it's not that big of a deal, just leave them spinning 24/7, that's what they're built for.

[OhioYJ]

I have wake on lan enabled on my NAS as I might access it maybe once or twice a month at best. For the reason it's off basically all the time.  So I'm on the side of let them spin down, as long as it's not constantly on / off it's fine. 

[mariushm]

Repeated cooling and heating up can hurt hard drives.

Parking the read write heads and moving them back in position is also a point where there's an increased risk of failure.

 

NAS grade drives are supposed to be a higher grade, capable of running 24/7 and handle vibrations (due to being close together to other drives) better, so it's unlikely you'd benefit from NOT running the drives 24/7

 

This being said, if you want to put them to sleep, I'd probably configure them for sleep after 30-45 minutes of idle time (or, if possible, only if that happens between 2am - 8am or whenever you're most likely to sleep)

 

The hard drives themselves consume around 6-8 watts when reading / writing and typically under 2 watts when idle so it's not like you're spending lots of money on power or saving money by turning them off.

[Enigma147]

Basicly it comes down to usage. 

 

Drives with data i really often use are SSD's, more efficient and faster. 

 

The other  less  used drives, I spin down after one hour of idle time. I noticed that after i accessed data on one of these drives, i usually acces them later again. So keeping them spinning once accessed is more efficient. 

 

 

 

 

 

[HanZie82]

Yeah ive always held the belief that (just for mechanical HDD's) its better to keep them running if you need them daily.

But if there's more then 4 days of no use they are better to be turned off.

But this is just one of many things that matter. How they are used and what types you have is as important as anything.

 

 

But personally my NAS is always on, have 5x 4TB spinners in there no time-out, and i use it at least once a day when i go to sleep watching some old series and such.
 

[DamirB]

2 hours ago, HanZie82 said:

Yeah ive always held the belief that (just for mechanical HDD's) its better to keep them running if you need them daily.

But if there's more then 4 days of no use they are better to be turned off.

But this is just one of many things that matter. How they are used and what types you have is as important as anything.

 

 

But personally my NAS is always on, have 5x 4TB spinners in there no time-out, and i use it at least once a day when i go to sleep watching some old series and such.
 

So this is after 15 days on 24/7 operation on the new WD Red Drives:

 

 

And this is on the USB drive which is often used for media streaming, also used with a 20minute sleep timer. This drive had been doing this for a previous machine for about two years

[mariushm]

It looks fine to me...

Temperature is a bit low, in general it's better to keep hard drives at around 30-40c ... don't overdo it with cooling if you don't need to.

 

See Google's hard drive study, page 6: disk_failures.pdf

 

Temperature is often quoted as the most important environmental factor affecting disk drive reliability. Previous studies have indicated that temperature deltas as low as 15C can nearly double disk drive failure rates [4]. Here we take temperature readings from the SMART records every few minutes during the entire 9-month window of observation and try to understand the correlation between temperature levels and failure rates. We have aggregated temperature readings in several
different ways, including averages, maxima, fraction of time spent above a given temperature value, number of times a temperature threshold is crossed, and last temperature before failure. Here we report data on averages and note that other aggregation forms have shown similar trends and and therefore suggest the same conclusions.
We first look at the correlation between average temperature during the observation period and failure. Figure 4 shows the distribution of drives with average temperature in increments of one degree and the corresponding annualized failure rates. The figure shows that failures do not increase when the average temperature increases. In fact, there is a clear trend showing that lower temperatures are associated with higher failure rates.
Only at very high temperatures is there a slight reversal of this trend.
Figure 5 looks at the average temperatures for different age groups. The distributions are in sync with Figure 4 showing a mostly flat failure rate at mid-range temperatures and a modest increase at the low end of the temperature distribution. What stands out are the 3 and 4 year old drives, where the trend for higher failures with higher temperature is much more constant and also more
pronounced.

 

[DamirB]

25 minutes ago, mariushm said:

It looks fine to me...

Temperature is a bit low, in general it's better to keep hard drives at around 30-40c ... don't overdo it with cooling if you don't need to.

 

See Google's hard drive study, page 6: disk_failures.pdf

 

Temperature is often quoted as the most important environmental factor affecting disk drive reliability. Previous studies have indicated that temperature deltas as low as 15C can nearly double disk drive failure rates [4]. Here we take temperature readings from the SMART records every few minutes during the entire 9-month window of observation and try to understand the correlation between temperature levels and failure rates. We have aggregated temperature readings in several
different ways, including averages, maxima, fraction of time spent above a given temperature value, number of times a temperature threshold is crossed, and last temperature before failure. Here we report data on averages and note that other aggregation forms have shown similar trends and and therefore suggest the same conclusions.
We first look at the correlation between average temperature during the observation period and failure. Figure 4 shows the distribution of drives with average temperature in increments of one degree and the corresponding annualized failure rates. The figure shows that failures do not increase when the average temperature increases. In fact, there is a clear trend showing that lower temperatures are associated with higher failure rates.
Only at very high temperatures is there a slight reversal of this trend.
Figure 5 looks at the average temperatures for different age groups. The distributions are in sync with Figure 4 showing a mostly flat failure rate at mid-range temperatures and a modest increase at the low end of the temperature distribution. What stands out are the 3 and 4 year old drives, where the trend for higher failures with higher temperature is much more constant and also more
pronounced.

 

Can't do anything about the temps, they don't even have airflow, PC is located in the attick and its quite cold outside now so I'm guessing that's it. In spring and summer the ambient temp will be higher I guess.