Better to spin down drives on idle or not?

[DanIdentity]

On idle, is it better to have your hard disks spin down and turn off? Or will hard disks experience less wear and tear if they are constantly running 24/7?

 

[Andyman902042]

Well it depends how often they spin up and down. For example I'm running folding@home and it saves it's progress every 15 minutes. It wouldn't be a good idea to set my drive to spin down every 10 minutes because it would spin up and down frequently and I doubt that would be good for it. If you're not going to use your computer for a while and you're not running a distrbuted computing project I'd say it would be safe. The main reason is to save energy though.

 

[David]

If the drive, when spinning down, is not going to be needed for a while, then spinning down is OK. Start-stop isnt a good idea though. Its also useful for laptops where saving power is often a priority.