External HDD - Consensus?
 

Greetings Everyone,
I just bought a Seagate External 200G HDD for "In case shit....." I am just wondering if there is a general feeling or consensus about whether to leave it on/pluged in 24/7? Is it better for the drive if I leave it on or off? It was a "signficant" investment (for a student) and I need it last as long as possible. Thanks for any help, info and suggestions you may have.

I would only plug it in when I was using it personally. I haven't used the model you've got, but mine just sits there and spins as long as it's plugged in so that's how I use mine. As a side-effect, if you're using it for data backup and you store it somewhere away from your computer, you'll have it if something goes disasterously wrong in your computer's environment - fire, flood, theft, etc.

Usually, the starting and stopping of the spindle puts more wear-and-tear on a drive than just leaving it spinning all the time. I wouldn't worry about leaving it on all the time. The drive is the same as any other IDE drives, just in a shell.

Our web and two nameservers use IDE drives from seagate and they're spinning all the time.

Also, the warranty is at least one year if not more. You shouldn't need to worry about it.

Fine, the actual starting and stopping may cause more wear and tear but how often is it starting and stopping versus how long does it remain spinning for? If its a backup drive that gets used once a week or so, shouldn't it wear less if you keep it unplugged when not using it?

Good thread - I am thinking of buying an external hdd but I hadn't even thought of the issue of leaving it plugged in and spinning.

As kutulu mentioned, your usage of the drive would probably determine if you keep it on all the time or not. I have an external case that I only have plugged in when I am using it. I should note that I use the external case as a lazy way to swap hd's because I don't want to keep digging in my case everytime I need to move data around.

I also believe that most hd's will spin down when not in use. I think that this is also a windows setting or a power setting. (Someone correct me if I'm wrong here), so keeping it powered or unpowered when not in use might not make a difference.