If you rely heavily on Hard Disk Drives, such as in a server environment or at home, your machines might keep HDDs powered on 24/7, though not actively using them continuously.
For this reason, HDDs have a feature called spindown, which allows the drive to stop spinning entirely. However, in medium-to-busy environments, frequent spindown could shorten the lifespan of your hard drive.
How? The drive spins down when the requests taper off, its platters coming to a complete stop. Moments later, a new wave of activity arrives, forcing the drive to spin back up.
Over the course of a day, this stop-start cycle happens dozens, if not hundreds of times. Multiply that by 365 days, and you’re looking at thousands of spin-up cycles.
Every time the drive spins up, the motor kicks into gear, the platters lurch from a dead stop to 7200 RPM (or more), and the read/write heads snap into position.
This process not only introduces latency and overhead; it also causes increased wear on the HDD.
To solve this issue, large datacenters, busy storage systems, and skilled engineers simply disable spindown.
It's fairly easy to do on a linux system:
Use root@root:~# fdisk -l to idenitfy your HDD;
Disable spindown: root@root:~# hdparm -S 0 /dev/sdX
(replace /dev/sdX with the actual HDD device)
That’s it!
Your HDD will continue spinning; no more latency spikes when the platters need to rev up, no more overhead from the system waiting on a sleeping drive, and—most importantly—no more unnecessary wear from those relentless cycles.
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