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Does nonstop reading from a hard drive reduce its lifespan? (self.sysadmin)

submitted 1 year ago by Kalcifer to c/sysadmin

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I was thinking of setting up a seedbox. Seeding will mean that the hard drive is being read from virtually non-stop. Is it fair to say that hard drives are designed for this? Or would this reduce the operational life-span of the hard drive?

For example, I was trying to find some spec in the Seagate Barracuda hard drive specifications document, but I wasn't able to find anything specific to this (or perhaps I just missed it).

I'm not exactly sure if this is the right community to post this, so let me know if there's a better place for it to go.

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[–] SheeEttin 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I don't know, but ideally that data would be cached in RAM. Maybe if you used intelligent tiered storage with a flash tier it could reduce wear and access times.

Ultimately I doubt that this is going to have a significant impact on drive lifespans. A surveillance camera PVR is writing 24/7 which is more intense, and those drives still last plenty long.

[–] Aqarius 9 points 1 year ago

Interestingly enough, there are HDDs purpose made for surveillance (eg. WD Purple), and their special feature is that they're dumb as bricks: since surveillance more or less continually writes, and only really reads when user directed, there's practically no start-stop-move head, no predictions, no sleep, no need to cache system files... Just write-write-write in a line, then when you run out of space, start over.

[–] Kalcifer 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I don’t know, but ideally that data would be cached in RAM.

Not feesible, unfortunately, if we are talking about multiple terabytes of data.

Maybe if you used intelligent tiered storage with a flash tier it could reduce wear and access times.

Could you clarify what you mean?

A surveillance camera PVR is writing 24/7 which is more intense, and those drives still last plenty long.

That's a fair point; however, I have seen special hard drives exactly for this purpose.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I would go with ZFS via Truenas. It makes the setup pretty simple and it will have all the benefits of zfs

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Torrents are never equally in demand. A large amount of ram could maybe cache the majority of reads, even to a multi-TB array.