Best kind of hard drive for heavy use?

[RW]

On Wed, 14 Sep 2016 05:18:06 +0200
Ralf Mardorf via freebsd-questions wrote:

> On Tue, 13 Sep 2016 22:38:55 +0200, Andrea Venturoli wrote:
> >(Speaking of WD Green, not WD in general) it is true, unless you run 
> >their utility (DOS only!) which disables this "feature".
> >However the drives will tend to fail in a short time all the same.  
> 
> That perhaps was true for some older drives, that spin down after a
> few seconds, but it anyway required something to wake up the drives
> again. Howvere, it's untrue for those drives that are just a few
> years old. My spins down after 30 minutes, and stays a sleep , if no
> evil software touches it.
 

Drives are typically rated for 300k load-cycles, so at 30 minutes
it's a non-issue - running the drive cooler and avoiding wear on
the moving parts probably extends its life.


> I don't use gvfs, smartd and similar software
> that touches the drives and enforce a spin up, directly after the
> drives goes asleep.

Are you saying that smartd does that when it's only monitoring? And do
you mean all drives, or just the one the OS is on?