External HDD advice

[daveb975]

I have got a Maxtor OneTouch external HDD, which has a default time of 1 hour of non-use before it spins down.

This is not a problem, but the drive seems to get very hot after 15 minutes or so usage. It seems likely that this will wear out the HDD quite quickly.

Will there be any significant performance disadvantage in reducing this to, say, 5 minutes?

[ohood]

Not sure, but setting it to 5 minutes would mean it'd be spinning up and down more often, which might mean more wear and tear. Depending on how often you accessed it of course.

[DeadKenny]

It's a trade off between excessive spin up/down wear or heat wear. If it spins down after 5 mins, how frequently will you use it to make it spin up again?. Does the thing not have a fan in the case?

These drives do get quite hot anyway, especially the bigger capacities. That's why I went for a 5400rpm in my enclosure as 7200 would be a bit too hot (no fan in mine).

P.S. where do you change the spin-down time? Is that something specific to the Maxtor One-Touch, or is it just a Windows setting?. I'm curious as I'd like to set a spin-down on my Western Digital external drive (self built with a USB2 enclosure).

[daveb975]

Thanks for the advice. I have moved it down to 3 minutes, which is the minimum. This is purely a back-up drive, so I do not access it that much. My internal HDD seems to spin up/down at will anyway, so hopefully the wear and tear shouldnt be too great.

The option to spin-down is included in the Maxtor software, and has options from 3 minutes up to 'never'.