External USB backup drive spinning continuously

freddyfruitbat wrote:
Does the panel think I am being overly concerned about the potential longevity of my USB drive, used in this manner?

Some of the USB drives hanging off my ReadyNAS boxes spin continuously and some spin down after 20 minutes or so, and I haven't had problems with either set. But of course I'm just one small sample, and even my oldest USB drive has only been spinning for a year, so who knows?

I generally prefer to leave everything on all the time, because I believe -- with no real evidence -- that the most common failures are caused by thermal or physical shock, or power-on current inrush, rather than by gradual wear of the drive's motor or spindle bearings (and I don't want any failures from crappy software that expects every attached drive to be instantly available and won't wait for the external drives to spin up)... But if you want to change the sleep time of your external Seagate drive, you can do so using the Seagate Drive Settings program:

http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/item/drive-settings-master-dl/