External hard drives running 24/7
 

I've got two external firewire/usb enclosures containing 320GB Seagate drives in them. They are attached to the iMac via Firewire.

The Intel iMac, it being a rather silent computer compared to the G3 iMac and G4 Towers I have, is left on 24/7 and that I have no qualms about. It's the external drives that I'm pondering about. At present they tend to be on during the day, then after my machine is backed up I unmount them (well one of them, the other is usually off 90 percent of the time anyway) and turn the unit off.

Is it wise to keep the drive on 24/7 or is my current procedure better? I can see perhaps a bit of extra wear and tear on the power switch on the enclosure and perhaps a bit of stress on the drive with the power up/down cycle, but am I just being paranoid?

Does anyone run such drives 24/7, have they had any problems?

fwiw, got one for my daughter's Imac, and it's not too happy about being left on 24/7. So, I don't leave it on :D

Besides, it teaches her (she's only 6) to conserve (my) power.... :D

Dan

The USB drive time bomb may be worth a read:) the bottom half at least

Dan,
Is it firewire or USB? What enclosure is it?

I've read the timebomb thing and I *think* the macally enclosure I use does spin the drive down, need to double check though. Even still, powering down the drive sounds like it might be the best option.

Mine went pop last night - Disk might be OK. . . some circuitry inside melted down, lots of smoke etc.

Lasted 3 years.

The way forward is to buy the caddy & disk as two items - get a disk with a 3 or 5 yr guarantee

i have had loads of external drives go down due to leaving them on a long time !!!

That's what I've done. I've got an UltraProducts enclosure and MacAlly Enclosure. The Utlra used to have a 300GB Maxtor drive in it. I didn't overly trust the enclosure as I kept getting drive issues, which I blamed on the enclosure, rather than the drive. So I got the MacAlly enclosure. The drive failed in that too, so I finally pulled my head out of my arse and found out the SMART status said it was failing.
It was within the 2yr warranty period so I RMA'd it. I needed a drive for backup so went for a 320GB Seagate.

Got a call from the place I purchased the maxtor from saying that they could give me a Maxtor or a 320GB Seagate (as maxtor is now owned by seagate), went for the seagate.

So if anything does happen I've got a spare drive to get data onto, or use whilst I (hopefully not) RMA the original drive.

USB mate - an unbranded caddy with a 200-odd Gig Maxtor in it.

DAn :)