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Hard Drive Power-On rating
If hard drive reliability is important: how does "power-on rating" account into it?
I looked at a couple seagate drives rated at 2400 hours.
Does this mean that it's only good for 2400 hours spinning? connected to power? or continuous? any thoughts?
We configure power settings in our on-boarding process and want to know if this is significant. I suppose this is the age-old argument of do we leave the hard drive spinning (wearing down the bearings) or spin-down/up (wearing down the electronics/spin up count). This might be a consideration for hardware longevity
Currently, we ask clients to keep their systems on and we do not touch the disk idle power settings. This becomes even more significant with servers and NAS.
The best thing I've found is "...The 2400-hour specification, which represents only 100 days of continuous operation, assumes that drives are used eight hours per day, five days per week..." - Toms Hardware
I looked at a couple seagate drives rated at 2400 hours.
Does this mean that it's only good for 2400 hours spinning? connected to power? or continuous? any thoughts?
We configure power settings in our on-boarding process and want to know if this is significant. I suppose this is the age-old argument of do we leave the hard drive spinning (wearing down the bearings) or spin-down/up (wearing down the electronics/spin up count). This might be a consideration for hardware longevity
Currently, we ask clients to keep their systems on and we do not touch the disk idle power settings. This becomes even more significant with servers and NAS.
The best thing I've found is "...The 2400-hour specification, which represents only 100 days of continuous operation, assumes that drives are used eight hours per day, five days per week..." - Toms Hardware
Interesting that Seagate is now publishing those specs ... and that they're so low.
Note that the drive warranties are far longer than that spec ... I wonder if they'll balk at replacing drives under warranty that have exceeded that. I have MANY drives with well over 30,000 power on hours ... but of course the SMART data doesn't show the difference between power-on and spinning. I suspect this spec is, as noted above, actually "spinning hours". But I'm VERY surprised it's so low.
Note that WD, Hitachi, and others do not publish a "power on hours" spec. But many drives are shown with availability specs of 24 x 7 and have 3-5 year warranties ... which would imply tens of thousands of power-on hours.
Note that the drive warranties are far longer than that spec ... I wonder if they'll balk at replacing drives under warranty that have exceeded that. I have MANY drives with well over 30,000 power on hours ... but of course the SMART data doesn't show the difference between power-on and spinning. I suspect this spec is, as noted above, actually "spinning hours". But I'm VERY surprised it's so low.
Note that WD, Hitachi, and others do not publish a "power on hours" spec. But many drives are shown with availability specs of 24 x 7 and have 3-5 year warranties ... which would imply tens of thousands of power-on hours.
2400 hours would be a pretty poor drive in light of the Seagate drives I have been using 10 hours a day for more than 10 years. I have to suspect that they dropped a zero in that figure.
Still, the Seagate warranties have been getting shorter. Five years, then three, then two, now one. Perhaps they are building drives now to the same standard as PCs ... if it lasts for two years, it's obsolete and should be replaced.
Still, the Seagate warranties have been getting shorter. Five years, then three, then two, now one. Perhaps they are building drives now to the same standard as PCs ... if it lasts for two years, it's obsolete and should be replaced.
I had the same "dropped a zero" thought -- but if so , they dropped it in all of their drives, as they all show 2400 - 4800 ratings. None of these really make sense, so I've really got no idea why they've added this to their spec sheets ... unless the goal is to provide a basis for refusing warranty support on drives with more than the "spec'd" number of hours.
Produce more and sell more. If you make things too good then soon you make overproduction and novody buys from you anything. Seems Seagate understood this :)
The way of the world, I see that on any Hard drive, I'm not buying that, but they are testing the waters to see if we bite, if we do it will be the norm across all manufactures.
Buy WD or Hitachi
I have hard drives still working from dos days, image a harddisk with only 1200mb harddisk space still working
Buy WD or Hitachi
I have hard drives still working from dos days, image a harddisk with only 1200mb harddisk space still working
ASKER
I have 2 of the above drives and they are both at ~8000+ hours and ~900+ startups as per CrystalDiskInfo.
The drives are rated for 300,000 load/unload cycles. I think that something about our understanding of "power-on rating" is wrong. I may just call seagate and ask.
The drives are rated for 300,000 load/unload cycles. I think that something about our understanding of "power-on rating" is wrong. I may just call seagate and ask.
Share with us what they answer to you.
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So my answer was correct. The drive spins when it gets i/o requests.
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I called Seagate and asked them directly what a Power-On rating is (the main section of my question).
But as every mechanism the drive has spinning parts and moving parts. And they have presumably some lifetime before they fail.