WD Red "Always On" or should I be letting them spin down?

[^nighthawk^]

Hi all,

Currently had my Nas4free box up and running tweaking things here and there and mainly transferring data to the box then organising that data.

Pretty soon though its not going to be dealing with large amounts of data being transferred from old slow drives (old laptop drives etc).

So should I be setting the WD Red drives to power down from now on?

Any other WD Red users got any experience with these? My last nas4free box with some Hitachi/Samsung drives certainly did not like being spun down and back up a lot.

Currently running hi-adaptive in power management, the disks are ZFS formatted/GELI encrypted.
Short SMART tests performed once a week, a long test once a month usually.

[crowi]

On one of my boxes I set spindown to 20 minutes with Reds (5 x 3TB / RAIDZ1) without problems.
It is not really recommended to do so - but for my system it works flawless.

[Parkcomm]

You have to look at the duty cycle (how much time it will spend off and for what duration) to calculate the power savings and compare that to head ware from parking. And you need to look at the whether the delay for spin up impacts operation - and use that to work out the spindown interval.

For me I gave up on the analysis in the end and mine stays on now. (but the cost/savings were pretty marginal)