How much will a USB drives life be shortened if its left on every night?

[yoda313]

I'm planning on using my ouya and a USB drive in a upnp setup. I'll be leaving it on overnight every night.

How much will this shorten a drives life?

I plan on cloning my drive so I can replace it right away.

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[Bjs]

About as much as:

A: Disconnect / reconnects during its working life cycle

B: How longs a piece of string

C: Anyone's guess ... some drives are rubbish

D: Openly ... possibly halved live cycle from heat retention

[hello_hello]

Does the USB drive put itself to sleep when it's not been used for a while? Many do.

[sambat]

I have 2 HP external drives (actually WD green) that get pinged every five minutes from Task Scheduler to keep them awake;they are two years old and seldom turned off.

[yoda313]

Hello-hello, I don't believe it does go into sleep mode. It was wide awake when I checked this morning.

@bjs - a half a life maybe? That doesn't sound too bad.

@sambat, 2 years sounds great, I'd settle for a year if I can.

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[johns0]

It won't shorten the life unless it's having data written on it.

[tun.tin]

...When you hear....click...click....click....it's about time to die..

[yoda313]

Johns0 - its in a read only environment so that's good news.

@tin tin - thanks for the heads up.

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[hello_hello]

Hard drive life is luck of the draw. According to the study google released a few years ago, the amount of work a hard drive does has no relationship to it's longevity, except...... high workload drives had a higher infant mortality rate than low workload drives.... in other words, thrash the drive while it's still under warranty and if it's still alive, how much work it does from then on won't effect it's life expectancy.

Likewise hard drive operating temperature didn't correlate to longevity despite popular belief to the contrary.
https://storagemojo.com/2007/02/19/googles-disk-failure-experience/

[Placebo]

Don't worry it won't get damaged if its kept enough cool .... Well thats the only thing which can shorten its life .. otherwise WDs work more than twice of its warranty period

[yoda313]

Thanks everyone. I feel better now.

But for insurance I am finally getting around to doing a full copy from harddrive to harddrive. I've got 1tb copying from drive a to drive b right now. It shows a 4 hour completion time. Oh well I'll just leave it on overnight.

I think it might be overkill but I'm actually gonna use another drive for the backup too. I'm actually not using it right so I might as well add another layer of protection.

Now that I think of it i should have dumped more on the first drive because I still have stuff to update. But it won't be a 1tb that's for sure.

I'm also gonna do some bluray burning to backup large folders for more insurance.

I haven't done it for this project yet. Well I have to some degree as certain parts have been put on the drive I'm copying now and on dvdr. I just haven't completely updated my backup.

But I'm glad this spurred me on to do it.

Edit - that four hour time is using usb 3 harddrives (both are 3's) and a usb 3 pci card. However I'm sure my motherboard is a bottle neck and not the latest and greatest. Obviously it doesn't have usb 3 built in - its a dell optiplex quad core q6600 tower running win 8. THe harddrives are all new though and so is the ram (done last summer, I posted about it).

But it's automated now so I just need to wait for it to be done.

Oh and it's all media files and stuff. There were over a 100,000 items to transfer so that's probably the main reason for a four hour transfer. I would bet it would be a bit shorter if it were just a few dozen 20gb movie files.

[hello_hello]

4 hours doesn't sound too unusual.

I just finished copying all the data from 2x 2TB drives to 2 new 2TB drives as backups. It took hours and hours and hours......
When it was done I copied some new files to each drive and discovered the process was a lot faster for one drive than the other. Both drives are WD Green drives connected directly to the MB (I have a couple of SATA cables dangling out of the rear of the PC). I connected two different drives and copied the files again. Same thing. One drive much faster than the other.

I checked and they're all aligned correctly (at least the horrid excuse for software called the WD/Acronis Align Tool says they are). I'm pretty sure one of the SATA cables is connected to the Intel SATA controller and the other to the JMicron SATA controller. I don't know which is which, but it appears one of those SATA controllers doesn't like WD Green drives so much. Sigh..... I guess I'm going to have to open it up to find out, play with the SATA configuration in the BIOS, probably look for newer Intel/JMicron drivers...... Computers....... sigh.....

[TreeTops]

On another board a I visit there has been comments/posts about JMicron Sata controller being slow. Newer driver for JMicron did not improve the speed.

[Moontrash]

if your going to use a usb drive 24/7 and your worried about over-heating then grab one of those adata usb 3 models that has a metal body...i have 3 of em...a couple are 2 years old and work perfectly. I run SSD's and download all files to the USB drives for the SSD's longevity. They've had many turn offs and ons and 2 years goin. No problems with me. Those metal bodies will get hot if there's intense data transfer in a USB 3 slot and the air outside should cool them better than if they were plastic or rubber.

[hello_hello]

On another board a I visit there has been comments/posts about JMicron Sata controller being slow. Newer driver for JMicron did not improve the speed.

Well it's good to know it's not just something odd going on with my PC. I've owned the PC for years so I guess it's the first time I've done something which directly compares the two controllers in terms of speed because the difference was fairly substantial. I'll check and run some proper tests later on to make sure it is just the JMicron controller but it wouldn't surprise me.
Cheers.

Update: Well much to my surprise, it turned out the speedier controller was the JMicron one. The difference wasn't as much as I thought, but the JMicron controller was definitely faster. As an example a 5.6GB file took 1 minute to copy to the drive connected to the Jmicron controller. The same file took 1 minute 15 seconds to copy to the drive connected to the Intel controller. Both drives were 2TB WD Green drives (same model), both with the same amount of free space (same files on each).

Oddly, the Intel controller sometimes seemed to start off slow (Windows would display a longer initial copying time) then catch up a bit. The difference wasn't always consistent. The Intel controller was always slower, but sometimes only by a few seconds.

For the sake of my sanity I'm going to assume it's because the Intel controller is running in RAID mode and running a pair of RAID-0 volumes, and being a software RAID controller the extra work slows it down sometimes. I should look for newer drivers though (although I doubt there'll be any as it's an older chipset) just in case......