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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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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For an SSD: not really, in theory.

For an HDD: kinda. Spinning up and spinning down the disk technically always comes with the risk of the drive damaging because of the physical components involved, and will eventually wear out. Constant writes would definitely be far harder on it, but more spinning time is always generally likely to wear it out faster.

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

Spinning up and spinning down the disk technically always comes with the risk of the drive damaging because of the physical components involved

Ideally, the seebox would maintain a 100% uptime.

Constant writes would definitely be far harder on it

Would there be a difference for constant reads (reading is what the seedbox would primarily be doing)?

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

Constant reads wouldn't be as hard on the drive, but again, the more the mechanics inside the drive work/move, the more they will wear down. For HDDs, most failures are mechanical failures.

That said, even with a consumer grade drive, I personally wouldn't worry too much about it; modern drives are pretty solid in general, just make sure you backup anything important.

If you're really worried about it, WD's gold line is made for constant reads/writes 24/7 and to be reliable under those conditions