Does nonstop reading from a hard drive reduce its lifespan?

I was thinking of setting up a seedbox. Seeding will mean that the hard drive is being read from virtually non-stop. Is it fair to say that hard drives are designed for this? Or would this reduce the operational life-span of the hard drive?

For example, I was trying to find some spec in the Seagate Barracuda hard drive specifications document, but I wasn’t able to find anything specific to this (or perhaps I just missed it).

I’m not exactly sure if this is the right community to post this, so let me know if there’s a better place for it to go.

thorbot ,

Yes, but the number of hours they can withstand these reads is rather insane. I’ve seen SAS level drives with millions of hours of runtime and no bad blocks. They are pretty robust these days!

mnvoronin ,

Hard drives are quite reliable these days. According to the Backblaze stats, the annualized failure rate for modern drives is only about 1.5%. And these guys beat the living shit out of their drives.

Kalcifer OP ,

Thanks a bunch for that link! That’s a really useful resource!

YourHuckleberry ,

I have seen HDDs advertised as WI (write intensive), RI (read intensive), and MU (mixed use). The advertising says that the WI drives will last longer under write intensive loads. I don’t know how much truth there is to that.

mnvoronin ,

That's for SSDs which is a different thing.

eerongal ,
@eerongal@ttrpg.network avatar

For an SSD: not really, in theory.

For an HDD: kinda. Spinning up and spinning down the disk technically always comes with the risk of the drive damaging because of the physical components involved, and will eventually wear out. Constant writes would definitely be far harder on it, but more spinning time is always generally likely to wear it out faster.

Kalcifer OP ,

Spinning up and spinning down the disk technically always comes with the risk of the drive damaging because of the physical components involved

Ideally, the seebox would maintain a 100% uptime.

Constant writes would definitely be far harder on it

Would there be a difference for constant reads (reading is what the seedbox would primarily be doing)?

eerongal ,
@eerongal@ttrpg.network avatar

Constant reads wouldn't be as hard on the drive, but again, the more the mechanics inside the drive work/move, the more they will wear down. For HDDs, most failures are mechanical failures.

That said, even with a consumer grade drive, I personally wouldn't worry too much about it; modern drives are pretty solid in general, just make sure you backup anything important.

If you're really worried about it, WD's gold line is made for constant reads/writes 24/7 and to be reliable under those conditions

SheeEttin ,

I don’t know, but ideally that data would be cached in RAM. Maybe if you used intelligent tiered storage with a flash tier it could reduce wear and access times.

Ultimately I doubt that this is going to have a significant impact on drive lifespans. A surveillance camera PVR is writing 24/7 which is more intense, and those drives still last plenty long.

Kalcifer OP ,

I don’t know, but ideally that data would be cached in RAM.

Not feesible, unfortunately, if we are talking about multiple terabytes of data.

Maybe if you used intelligent tiered storage with a flash tier it could reduce wear and access times.

Could you clarify what you mean?

A surveillance camera PVR is writing 24/7 which is more intense, and those drives still last plenty long.

That’s a fair point; however, I have seen special hard drives exactly for this purpose.

Aqarius ,

Interestingly enough, there are HDDs purpose made for surveillance (eg. WD Purple), and their special feature is that they’re dumb as bricks: since surveillance more or less continually writes, and only really reads when user directed, there’s practically no start-stop-move head, no predictions, no sleep, no need to cache system files… Just write-write-write in a line, then when you run out of space, start over.

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