external HD on or off ?

D

detuned6

Metal dude
I just got a western digital ex. hard drive, and noticed that it dosent have a on/ off switch. My PC stays on all the time so in turn the external will also since its on the same surge protector.
Is it bad to leave ex. HD's on for weeks on end??
I dont whant to prematurlly burn it out(if possible)
 
I dont see a problem with it. Your PC is staying on which means your internal drive is staying on...so whats the difference.
 
My external drives are plugged into their own circuit breaker strip. I leave them turned off except when I'm doing backups. Then I turn them on before I boot up the computer and turn them off after I've shut it down...maybe too many years using SCSI drives, but hopefully it'll add some years to their lives.
 
Most hard drive have a MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) of a couple of hundred thousand hours. You do the math....

I used to work for a SCSI hard drive manufacturer (no longer in business) and when I was BSing with the engineers there they spent most of their time figuring out ways to get the darn things started and stopped safely; running them full time was preferable. At the tiny sized of the wire that makes up the read/write head, the ATOMS of the platters and heads tend to "weld" together if you just leave them in contact; there's all kinds of code built in to park them safely.

Basically, don't worry about it.
 
The SCSI device I had was a CD burner (the good old days, right?) and it was so noisy I couldn't leave it on. Thus the cycling...
 
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I have an external usb/firewire iogear ion 80 gig hard drive. I wish mine didn't have an on/off switch.. it often gets into fits and will just turn off for no apparent reason. window's says delayed write failure. Baically i want a new drive becuase mine seems like a piece of crap. The saying is often true though, it's not the tools it the people who use them... i prolly broke myself. i just don't know what i did.
 
Do you mean physically powers off or the USB/Firewire connection gets dropped ?

If it's being physically powered off then that doesn't sound like a problem with the drive but something with the power supply for the case. I don't think that windows can control the power going to an external HD unless maybe it's drawing it power from USB ?

If the connection is being dropped then you might want to check to make sure you have all the latest microsoft updates installed.
 
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