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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

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