Life Expectancy of Mechanical Hard Drives with Turn off hard disks after: Never

c627627 · Nov 11, 2015

Still fine tuning my Windows 10 installation and I've always had this setting on NEVER:

Right click on Windows 10 Start Button > Control Panel > View By: Category > Hardware and Sound > Power Options > Change when the computer sleeps > Change advanced power settings >
Hard disk > Turn off hard disk after > Never > Apply > OK > Save changes

But actually Windows 10 has no Never option like Windows XP/Vista/7/8 did and forces you to type in any number of minutes. I tried 180. But I noticed that when I try to save anything, it takes a little bit for those few mechanical hard drives I still have in my system to wake up.

My computer is ON 16 hours a day and OFF 8 hours or less a day.

What is your educated guess on how my mechanical hard drive life expectancy is affected if I select Never vs. after 180 minutes?

Mr.Scott · Nov 11, 2015

I run all mine on NEVER.
I have 10+ year old drives that still work fine.

HankB · Nov 11, 2015

Got me beat. I have several 200GB Barracudas that have over seven years (of hours) on them and they're running strong if not fast.

Drives purchased back then seem to outlive their usefulness. I think we have the same expectations of SSDs today. I'm less certain of the longevity of the modern HDDs. I've had one 2TB Seagate develop thousands of remapped sectors and another that started down that path. That's after several years - well out of warranty but before I wanted to retire them. Mine typically run 24x7 if I have them in service.

c627627 · Nov 11, 2015

How did you discover that it developed remapped sectors?
How do you tell that a drive is going bad, other than the obvious old clicks of death and similar?

HankB · Nov 11, 2015

c627627 said:
How did you discover that it developed remapped sectors?

SMART data:

Code:

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 10
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x000f   118   097   006    Pre-fail  Always       -       198949915
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0003   100   100   000    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   100   100   020    Old_age   Always       -       739
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   033   033   036    Pre-fail  Always   FAILING_NOW 2747
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x000f   077   060   030    Pre-fail  Always       -       51311435
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   089   089   000    Old_age   Always       -       10216
 10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0013   100   100   097    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   020    Old_age   Always       -       739
183 Unknown_Attribute       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
184 Unknown_Attribute       0x0032   100   100   099    Old_age   Always       -       0
187 Reported_Uncorrect      0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
188 Unknown_Attribute       0x0032   100   094   000    Old_age   Always       -       752
189 High_Fly_Writes         0x003a   098   098   000    Old_age   Always       -       2
190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022   071   055   045    Old_age   Always       -       29 (0 2 31 22)
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   029   045   000    Old_age   Always       -       29 (0 14 0 0)
195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered  0x001a   044   022   000    Old_age   Always       -       198949915
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0012   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0010   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x003e   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
240 Head_Flying_Hours       0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       69647189684149
241 Unknown_Attribute       0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       3068904939
242 Unknown_Attribute       0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       2165380318

There was no noise or any other indication that I could discern. This was one of a pair in a RAID 1 set. It never even got kicked out of the RAID. I retired it before it went really bad.

Edit: Reallocated is probably the more accurate term than remapped.

c627627 · Nov 11, 2015

What is that, a manufacturer diagnostic program?

I've been asking this question periodically... trying to figure out a way to test my mechanical 2TB drives for signs of failure. They seem fine but I wouldn't mind doing a test once in a while.

HankB · Nov 11, 2015

c627627 said:
What is that, a manufacturer diagnostic program?

Smartmontools on Linux.

According to the page at https://www.smartmontools.org/ "It should run on any modern Darwin (Mac OS X), Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, OS/2, Cygwin, QNX, eComStation or Windows system." I've never tried it on anything other than Linux.

I know that there are other tools that do this on Windows but I am less familiar with them. Googling "SMART diagnostics" will find more info including https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_S.M.A.R.T._tools

satrow · Nov 11, 2015

Yet another little excuse to delay seriously considering a move to W10.

The dreaded SMART attribute #5, eh.

I run HD Sentinel permanently on Windows, feels like it's more human friendly than other SMART monitors I've tried, good background articles on the site, the author seems quite helpful too.

c627627 · Nov 11, 2015

Thanks.
The Time can technically be set to a seemingly endless number of digits for minutes - essentially making the time Never.

I have made major breakthroughs in resolving all Windows 10 issues, this one being by far the strangest
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/...ws-10-gets-blurry-when-higher-DPI-is-selected

So much like with Windows 8, things can be adjusted on Windows 10 to be like they were before. But it does take effort.

Sologuy · Nov 12, 2015

The more times you turn the HD's on and off with mechanical HD's, the shorter the lifespan will be, simple fact of anything mechanically moving, principle same as an automobile.

EarthDog · Nov 12, 2015

c627627 said:
What is your educated guess on how my mechanical hard drive life expectancy is affected if I select Never vs. after 180 minutes?

Not a clue...my preference, is not to get lost in the minutia. We have posted up drive failure rates here before. In those datasets, I would imagine most of those people are not power users and don't touch any settings. So what you are seeing in that thread is a result of it's natural life. Could it be extended by selecting never? Probably..I'm with solos thoughts. How long? Who the hell would know...what is a guess even worth? My suggestion is to put it on never and if you want to know more about the drive, look at its smart data through the mfg program or hdtune.

Edit: disregard my reference to that dataset... it was first year failures...that said there was another test on drives in an enterprise environment, not close to what we would experience, but it's an interesting look at failure rates... particularly to put them in perspective.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-update-september-2014/

ATMINSIDE · Nov 14, 2015

In Windows 10, simply enter "0" into the setting field for "Turn off hard disk after" and it will change to "Never".

Life Expectancy of Mechanical Hard Drives with Turn off hard disks after: Never

c627627

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