SpinDown: Do You Use It?

I do use it, but with conservative settings. The timer is set to 30 minutes on my backup NAS, and 60 minutes on the main Pro-6. I suspect pro-6 doesn't spin down too much - its used fairly frequently during the day, crashplan and frontview backups are also running at night. The various backup NAS definitely do spin down.

Note that you should have UPS protection if you enable spindown. (IMO you should have UPS protection anyway).

I see a couple benefits for spindown
(a) Battery drain on the backup NAS UPS is much lower (particularly during the day), allowing me to use that UPS to protect more stuff with reasonable running time on battery. (The PC is sleeping at night, when the NAS are spun up, the PC is running during the day, when the NAS are spun down...)
(b) The NAS are quieter when spun down. (for me this matters more for the backup NAS, which are in my home office).
(c) I don't see much chance of shortening disk life, since the settings I use limit the number of spin-ups per day to a fairly small number. So I see no downside, and perhaps some upside for disk life.
(d) Power savings are small, but if there is no downside, then why not?

BTW, are you just spinning down, or do you have the NAS on a automatic power up/down schedule?

StephenB wrote:

Right now, I have it set to spin-down after 45 minutes of inactivity - period.

When I wrote the OP, I thought I had System | Power | Power Timer | Enable power timer = True with the schedule being to spin down for most of the night, but now that I'm checking I see that sometime in the past I disabled that feature.

Can't recall what the problem was... but I'm guessing that 45 minutes of inactivity will get it through most of the night most days without disc access/spinup delays during the day becoming a nuisance when I'm using my PC.