I wouldn't think that spinning up frequently would shorten it's life any more than if it stayed spinning. It may be very irritating from a performance point of view though.
I would think that bouncing the head round doing frequent reads/writes would be much more destructive. If one were to re-read the same file evey time, it would read from cache - would this cause the platter to keep spinning? Though, presumably this would cause the access time to be updated, so - back to doing frequent writes. Try a different usb enclosure. paulm On 25/12/2009, at 7:46 AM, frantisek holop wrote:
hi there, i have a usb external disk that spins down grotesquely soon, 10s of inactivity sends it sleeping. hearing the disk spin up every time makes me think how soon it will die if i keep this up for long. as atactl is not working for external ata disks used through the scsi layer, i was wondering if anyone has an idea of how to keep the disk spinning in a way that read and write performance doesn't suffer too much. -f -- tower: "say position." pilot: "position."
