To spin down or not to spin down?

[Enquiries]

Gday Crew!

Love the work you do!

and feel free to send me a link if this topic has been covered by yourselves before.

I have …

a Terramaster F6-424 Max with a pair of 10tb Seagate Exos HDD’s in rapid 0 config and a pair of 18tb Segate Exos HDD’s in raid 0 config.

All relatively new drives … 2024 / 2025 date of manufacture.

The nas is being used as a Plex server ONLY.

I keep most of my new / to watch video content to be watched on a SATA SSD pool on the nas.

My question: is it safe, wise, effective to have my drives spin down - currently set to a 5 hr in-activity threshold.

Some sources say let the drives spin 24/7 and other say it’s safe to set them to spin down.

I would love your advice.

Thanks in advance.

[ed]

For a Plex only setup like yours, letting the Exos drives spin down is absolutely fine. These drives are enterprise rated and can handle regular spin up cycles without meaningful wear. A five hour timeout is a good middle ground: it saves heat and noise, reduces power draw, and avoids constant on off cycling. The only downside is a short delay the first time Plex touches a file on a spun down pool. If that doesn’t bother you, keep the spindown enabled.

If you ever move to more active workloads like VMs or heavy docker use, you would keep them spinning. But for media storage, spindown is safe, effective, and normal.

A few useful items here:
Seagate Exos
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Seagate+Exos&...=ncmail-20