Hi guys,
i really appreciate this forum and your great input 
I need to exchange one of my datadrives, as it will probably fail in near future (see my other topic)
Now, i bought a new 16TB replacement drive.
I don't know, it i should setup the disk to spindown after a certain time or if this is bad for the drive health and the livetime.
It is a Toshiba MG09ACA16TE, that spins with 7200 rpm and has 512MB of Cache.
I would appreciate your input on this topic.
thanks and best regards 
gkhar2
Many opinions and little data regarding this topic. I would spin down the drive, if it does not spin up more than once a day. But I have no evidence to backup this opinion.
You should upgrade to OMV7. OMV6 is end of line for looooong time.
EDIT: at least some backup for my rule of thumb
Depends really on the usage of that particular drive. I spin down drives which I only occasionally use during the week for e.g. streaming a movie in the evening or doing a backup once in a while. I don't see a point in having drives with such usage scenarios spin 24/7 and waste rather expensive energy here in Germany. Other things like OMV itself and docker services I serve from energy efficient SSDs anyway where spin down doesn't apply/matter.
Of course you should make sure that your spinned down drive(s) don't spin up constantly during the day/night due tue misconfiguration and/or some kind of service which of course would be counter productive. Hd-idle is the only service which spins down HDDs reliably for me.
Regarding the lifetime of a harddisk, modern harddisks should be able to handle a huge amount of load/unload cycles. For example, these WD drives are specified for 600,000 cycles.
there is a difference between load/unload cycle and start/stop cycle
| Load/Unload Cycle | Counts each time the head is parked and then loaded back onto the disk for read/write tasks. |
| Start/Stop Cycle | Counts each time the drive's spindle motor is powered up or down (disk starts or stops spinning) |
There are no data given in the datasheet for start/stop cycle reliability.
Good point, this is probably lower. According to Toshiba this is between 10.000 - 50.000 for their non datacenter harddisks and it's not specified for datacenter harddisks. I can only guess that they're not designed for a high number of start / stop cycles but I'm certainly planning on 1 - 2 start/stop cycles per day for my next NAS build (with data center drives).
EDIT 9-6-2025: I found a product manual for the HC550 Ultrastar harddisks which specifies the number of start / stop cycles:
6.4.5 Start/stop cycles
The drive withstands a minimum of 50,000 start/stop cycles in a 40° C environment and a minimum of 10,000
start/stop cycles in extreme temperature or humidity within the operating range.
So doing this on a daily basis shouldn't be a problem.
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