[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

Not correct, sorry. The drive staying on the whole time is not incredibly damaging, and drives are designed to run warm, otherwise they wouldn't get warm.

Google released a study that showed that hard drives running too cool (ie outside the manufacturers expected operating environment) had a similar increase in failures as drives running too hot. Additionally, all drives suffer wear and tear from spinning up and down - load/unload cycles on the drives heads, as well as thermal expansion/contraction from heating/cooling cycles, etc all accelerate wear and tear on the drive when you turn them on and off constantly.

Now, a poorly designed drive enclosure could cause a drive to run hotter than designed for, which could shorten the life of the drive, and for that reason I'd look for an external drive enclosure with a metal casing that will do a better job dissipating heat than plastic, but if you stuck your hand inside a computer, which has airflow and generally lots of open space around the drives, you'd be surprised how hot some models get. Some server hard drives even have burn warnings printed on them, and they live in high airflow enclosures in air conditioned rooms!

At the end of the day, your data is in all likelyhood more valuable than the cost of a single hard drive, and for that reason, its worth it to do your best to not have single copies of data out there, whether its on a hard drive, a tape drive, or a DVD. You need two copies minimum if you value your data.

My main point was than an external should see minimal usage and I still believe that is true. I turn on my externals only about once a month when I go through a backup cycle. I absolutely don't trust the power regulation circuitry on those things. I've had expensive higher-end enclosures short and totally burn out two Seagate drives. Fortunately, they are built with an overvoltage protection chip that works like a fuse. I learned from a Seagate engineer that I could just pry off the melted chip with some pliers and would be able to use the drive normally and recover my data.