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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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[–] 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.