1

I used to judge an HDD's lifespan by its power-on time. But someone says new HDD will keep power-on but not spinning when it's idle. Is this true? Also, I find the power-on time increases as long as my laptop is on, though I did have the "shut down the hard disk after 20 minutes" setting in win10. (I bought it a year ago and have a 7200h power-on time.) The previous theory may explain this.

BTW, how can I tell if an HDD is spinning or not besides listening with my ears (no HDD light, of course)? I had googled for a lot while but find nothing.

kakakali
  • 41
  • 1
  • 7
  • You're confusing correlation with causation. Failure rates for equipment tend to increase with age. See [bathtub curve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve). Electronic components are known to age & fail due to heat exposure. The reliability of electronic components (e.g. MTTF) is measured in power-on hours. HDDs are know to fail due to shock, vibration, and heat. POH is just one metric in evaluating HDD lifespan. – sawdust Oct 09 '22 at 00:37

2 Answers2

0

A desktop hard drive can run non-stop. My Desktop machines (progressively different and newer along the way) have been running non-stop for about 2 decades.

I turned hard drive laptops (true until this machine now SSD) off each night and started them each morning.

Unless power on is affected by disk errors, power on time does not predict lifespan in any way.

Suspend will turn off a hard drive and some (but not all) hard drives will spin down. You would need to listen to determine if spinning. The HD light just depicts activity. There are third party indicators (Tray Status) but they just indicate activity.

Generally good quality drives are meant to withstand normal use with aplomb. But Mean Time to Failure can get in the way

John
  • 46,167
  • 4
  • 33
  • 54
  • Thanks for your answer. The [wiki of power-on hours](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-on_hours) says "Power-on hours is intended to indicate a remaining lifetime prediction for hard drives", so I think the value may imply something :) – kakakali Nov 18 '19 at 02:46
  • I think that relationship you are referring to is minimal. Taking into account all our clients, we have hundreds of machines with hard drives. Maybe 1 or 2 % have hard drive issues. The other 98% expire of old age before the hard drives fail with errors – John Nov 18 '19 at 02:49
  • Yeah. I read some posts complaining about data loss with broken HDD and got a bit worried. But I agree with you that most of HDD users will be issue-free. – kakakali Nov 18 '19 at 03:05
  • A number of posts in the WiKi article above date back some years and hard drives have improved markedly in during the most recent decade. I lost the second hard drive in my current Desktop (MTBF) and lost some old data but the main drive is fine and no current data lost. It is all SSD now (I converted it). So failures happen but overall hard drives work well (especially the commercial ones) – John Nov 18 '19 at 03:06
  • So, new HDD in win10 will keep power-hour increasing when sysytem is on, AND meanwhile have auto-sleep when idle (which makes power-on hour meaningless)? My system disk is SSD but another is HDD-_- – kakakali Nov 18 '19 at 03:17
  • I am not saying the power-on time is completely meaningless, just that for decent drives, they will last for a very long time (95% of them) – John Nov 18 '19 at 03:19
  • Yeah, I see. Here I want to confirm the technical detail: whether the new HDD in win10 will keep power-hour increasing when system is on, AND meanwhile have auto-sleep when idle. If it is, the power-on hour will not matter that much as it used to. Hard drive lifespan is influenced by many factors and we could only draw a Statistic conclusion. This is natural. – kakakali Nov 18 '19 at 03:32
0

I used to judge an HDD's lifespan by its power-on time.

No,you cannot predict an HDD’s lifespan depending on the power-on time.

But someone says new HDD will keep power-on but not spinning when it's idle. Is this true?

Yes,It is true as they are programmed to run in idle /non-spinning state when not in use but they are still powered on so that they can be ready to use when required.This also helps in power saving thereby helping with just a tiny bit of battery life as well.

Also, I find the power-on time increases as long as my laptop is on, though I did have the "shut down the hard disk after 20 minutes" setting in win10.

Power-on time is bound to increase as it is still in non-spinning/idle state so it needs some power to be ready for use.(HDD’s take a small amount of time to start up from a switched off mode,so it is better to keep it super low on power to save time,doing the same is power efficient as well)Windows is doing it’s job correctly as it is “shutting it down” by putting it into idle state when not in use(read the settings properly,it says only when not used for 20 minutes). You can’t shutdown a drive completely unless you have don’t have your windows installed in it because then windows would shutdown as well.

BTW, how can I tell if an HDD is spinning or not besides listening with my ears (no HDD light, of course)?

In laptops,the HDD is located beside the trackpad(usually) so you can feel the heat/vibration but if you want to be sure that it is in idle state/not spinning you could open task manager and in the performance tab you can select the hard disk graph and see the data given below,if you see that there is 0kbps read/write or anything less than 1kbps or if you see the active time less than 2%,you can say that it is not spinning.

Valay_17
  • 716
  • 1
  • 7
  • 19
  • 1
    Great answer! Now my system and all software are in SSD and only files are in HDD. In this condition, with the "shut down the hard disk after 20 minutes" setting, HDD power-on hour still increases as long as the system is on (and I am sure that I have a lot of idle time - when no I/O on HDD). This is regular (the auto-sleep works) and doesn't mean the platter is always spinning, right? – kakakali Nov 18 '19 at 05:31
  • 1
    What makes me confusing is that I read some articles saying HDD has limited power-on hour (just statistical assessment, of course). So with new (compared to the old ones without auto-sleep technology) HDD, the power-on hour does not reflect the consumption of (predicted) lifespan, right? I've seen too many users rely on this value，so do we have any better choices to assess an HDD's lifespan? – kakakali Nov 18 '19 at 05:32
  • 1
    And the task manager is nice but not that perfect. I mean if there is something other than touch/listen/... (system API, for example) tell us the real physical status of the hard disk? I've seen related topics and the view is that "if you want to get the status data in disk, you make the disk active". System may know this without activating the disk, I think-_-. – kakakali Nov 18 '19 at 05:47
  • @kakakali Both your first and second comments are absolutely right,you don’t need to worry about your HDD’s lifespan because I have been using a single HDD in one of my few laptop daily for 6-8 hours for approximately 6 years and it is still in a very good condition.If you are worried about your HDD’s failing,you could always use RAID tech to secure your data in case of a failure.You should actually use HDD quite often to increase it’s lifespan. – Valay_17 Nov 18 '19 at 05:51
  • Also, using any system API will actually send a signal to the HDD thereby activating it again,so task manager is passively performing the job. – Valay_17 Nov 18 '19 at 05:54
  • @kakakali Since I don’t quite care about the lifespan,I am afraid I have a better choice to access an HDD’s lifespan but I hope I may have helped you with every other question of your’s.If there is still anything that you want to know please feel free to comment. – Valay_17 Nov 18 '19 at 06:00
  • Thank you for your dedicated answer! I'm not that worried and I do have other more SSDs and HDDs. I was just too curious and I want to make sure my win10 works well (somewhat perfectionism on win10, perhaps). – kakakali Nov 18 '19 at 06:01
  • @kakakali Me too – Valay_17 Nov 18 '19 at 06:02
  • Um, at last, it would be great if any related technical docs or such that can be recommended. (Microsoft does have a document site but I didn't find much on hard-disk auto-sleep. The manufacturer may have better specs) – kakakali Nov 18 '19 at 06:10
  • @kakakali I’ll search a little bit and let you know in a while. Also let me know the manufacturer of your HDD. – Valay_17 Nov 18 '19 at 06:11
  • @kakakali I am afraid I can find one,Sorry but do let me know if you do Good Luck . – Valay_17 Nov 18 '19 at 06:27
  • It's hard to find something valuable, especially when lacking accurate definitions of standby/sleep/turned-off/powered-off/.... By [this](https://superuser.com/a/1103774/954406) I can detect the standby status (not simply idle) of HDD, but I can't figure out what "standby" really is without any official proofs. I'd let you know if I find something credible. – kakakali Nov 18 '19 at 11:30
  • @kakakali sure will be waiting – Valay_17 Nov 18 '19 at 16:17