Question Hard Drives for NAS - Okay to Turn on and Off?

[Oasis Curator]

I have a bunch of disks in my computer that I use as a media server.
I have set Windows to turn off the PC after 10 mins, turn off the screen after 2 mins and turn off the hard drives after 5 mins. This is to simply conserve a bit of power when watching a long film and also to cut down on any noise.

If I was to get some Seagate Iron Wolf drives, apart from giving myself a boost in storage, would these drives be okay turning on and off like this? Or should I just stick to some desktop versions instead?

 

[kanewolf]

I have a bunch of disks in my computer that I use as a media server.
I have set Windows to turn off the PC after 10 mins, turn off the screen after 2 mins and turn off the hard drives after 5 mins. This is to simply conserve a bit of power when watching a long film and also to cut down on any noise.

If I was to get some Seagate Iron Wolf drives, apart from giving myself a boost in storage, would these drives be okay turning on and off like this? Or should I just stick to some desktop versions instead?

The rule of thumb I follow is if the mechanical device (fan, disk, etc) will be unused for multiple hours, then powering off is better than leaving it running.
I wouldn't recommend turning off spinning disks after 5 min of idle. 30min? Yeah.

 

[punkncat]

Shouldn't cause any issue aside from latency on trying to access them after every five minutes. Going to act a lot like a WD Green with that type of power plan.

 

[Oasis Curator]

Ha ha, I only use the 5 minutes as when we're sat watching a film from one hard disk, the others are not required so happy to turn them off.

I'm looking at much larger Seagate NAS drives anyway, so there won't be an option to turn the drives off individually (I'd only have two or three compared with the 5 or 6 drives I have now). I guess it's more to whether the NAS is happy being turned on and off - we usually watch some stuff every couple of days, maybe down to once a week so it really doesn't need to be on all the time.

 

[SkyNetRising]

NAS drives are designed for 24/7 operation. You don't have to turn them on/off all the time.
If your drives are too noisy, then improve noise dampening - rubber washers in mounting points, pc case noise dampening materials.