Back in December i got my first ReadyNAS as a replacement for my 6 year old 400GB Plextor NAS. The new ReadyNAS had a single 1 TB Seagate Barracuda disk and is running perfectly, after i have copied about 300GB of data off the Plextor NAS onto the ReadyNAS. Back i February i added a second 1 TB Seagate Barracuda disk for redundancy, and after appox. 4 hours the sync had finished.
2 weeks ago I tested the Auto Power-Down/Up feature, and seemed to work fine, so i decided to setup my ReadyNAS to shut down during nighttime except in the weekends where it runs 24h.
Now I wonder if it would acctually be better for the disks to run 24h instead of being shut down for approx. 7 hours 5 nights a week.
Would the lifetime of the disks be better if they are on all the time, or should I just keep using the Auto Power-Down function?
I don't think there is much quantitative information on this topic - most of the reliability studies have been done in commercial data centers, where the latency associated with disk spin up is unacceptable.
What is clear is that you shouldn't spin up too aggressively (1-6 times an hour is the range I've seen quoted). You are doing it once a day, which is well below that.
After having my ReadyNAS Duo v.1 running with the shutdown/startup cycle during night time, I have been doing some tests to see what the difference in power consumption would be.
The power company uses automated reading and reporting power meters, so I can use their website to see my power consumption of every single hour. If I take a look at the consumption from 23.00 to 06.00 I can not see any noticable difference whether the Duo is running or not, so I have decided to just leave it on at all times, and then just do a manual shutdown whenever I go away for more than a few days.
