Hard Drive Wear While Playing Music

[Bruce Johnson]

Here's a question for you computer guys:

I have a computer out in my shop, which I keep running about 14 hrs per day. It's an older Dell 8200 with XP. I mostly use it for logging labor hours and data in Excel. I tap a few lines into it every half hour or so, so it's normally not getting heavy usage. I'm not sitting there using it continuously.

Recently, I hooked it up to my shop stereo system, and I've been slowly recording old obscure CD's and cassettes onto it as mp3 files. I'm making up playlists, and using the computer as a jukebox. It's been working fine, and it's been fun digging up old music that I haven't heard in a long time.

My question is this: When the computer is sitting there playing mp3 files, is that keeping the hard drive running continuously? Assuming that the hard drive normally sleeps if I don't touch the computer for a half hour, am I now putting 10 times the hours of wear on the drive that I was before? I'm not so concerned with the cost of the hard drive, but with the hassle of having it die and having to replace all of the software and files, etc.

If I were to put the music files on a second hard drive or, better yet, a big USB thumb drive, and have the computer draw the mp3 files from there, would that relieve the burden on the main hard drive?

[Jazz P Bass]

#1: Back Up your data.
Having 2 drives is a good way to do that.
#2 Running off a mem stick will not effect the hard drive at all.

[m-fine]

Unless it is a machine with power save features, the hard drive is always spinning from bootup to shutdown.

[Steve Conner]

And if it does have power saving features, which a laptop probably does, well, every spin-up and spin-down of the hard drive wears it out a little too. The heads ride on a cushion of air when the drive is spinning at speed, but they scrape the platters a little on every takeoff and landing. Hard drive wear isn't as simple as "hours of run time": it may actually last longer spinning 24/7.

The whole purpose of the hard drive is to spend endless hours spinning for your entertainment. If your computer is making you happy by helping you to enjoy your obscure old music, that's what it's designed for.

Just use the thing, don't worry about it, and make sure all of your valuable files are backed up. Perhaps on a second hard drive that you stash in a drawer somewhere, and plug in every so often to do a backup. I use Acronis True Image for this on Windows machines. If your hard drive blows out, it's supposed to be able to reconstruct your computer the way it was onto a new one.

[Steve A.]

I worked as a service tech for almost 30 years and it was starting motors that put the biggest strain on them- as long as the bearings were lubricated and there was plenty of ventilation they would last the longest running 24/7. And that isn't addressing the issues specific to a hard drive.

I advise everyone to examine the power settings for their Windows computer- the default is for at least the monitor to shut off when idle. I turn my monitor off manually when I leave the room although my computer is usually on 24/7. Speaking of monitors, turning the old CRT models on and off a lot seemed to put a strain on them- perhaps the high voltage caps charging and discharging? I dunno.

True story... I was watching Hard Rain when it came out on DVD and had just wired up my surround speakers. Half way through the movie I was really impressed by the sound effects- it was as though the lightning was coming from down the hall in my bedroom. After a few minutes I thought I better investigate and sure enough it was the monitor in the back room with blue sparks coming out of it. The monitor was only 2 years old so I tried to repair it but I was totally spooked- if you put your finger on the screen you'd get zapped with a big spark. Or maybe I was just imagining that... <g>

[bob p]

Steve's story reminds me of the time that I bought my Carver M-1.5t and experimented with some of the first fully digital recordings that were available on CD. (This is back when CD was new technology, maybe in the 1980s.)

I was playing the 1978 Telarc recording of the 1812 Overture, the one with the digital cannon blasts. There was one particularly awesome cannon blast, which my JBL studio monitors reproduced with outstanding effect: it sounded like a gunshot, the room smelled like smoke, and the paper woofer cone burst into flame.

I guess that's what happens when you push 1200 watts of cannon blast into a woofer -- you get lifelike reproduction -- once.

[bob p]

I think that by continually playing music, your PC might be preventing your HD heads from parking, and that might actually prolong the HD's life.

The tradeoff is that not parking the heads will constantly keep the drive heads in the turbulent airstream as the platter spins beneath them. The constant spinning of the platter and the aerodynamic drag on the heads will increase power consumption, and it will increase the drive's operating temperature. Increased temp could shorten life. Looking at your drive's S.M.A.R.T. data could provide some useful answers.

As Steve pointed out, parking the heads wears out the drives. WDC had a real problem with over-aggressive head parking on their "Green" drives. By configuring the firmware to park the heads every 8 seconds to make the drives ultra-low in power consumption, this caused some users who used the green drives in high access applications to reach the drive's rated lifetime for head parks in as little as 90 days. Drives began to fail and the green drives got a bad reputation for reliability because some people mis-deployed inexpensive drives that were designed for archival as replacements for expensive enterprise class drives.

Perhaps the biggest factor that's worth worrying about is what your operating system is doing with the drives behind your back. Desktop environments commonly beat on drives, continually updating index files on your hard disks, to make disk searches faster. These daemons can keep the drives running constantly, so that the heads never park and the drive never spins down to the low power state. You can sometimes see this, where the HD lamp will flash at 1 Hz intervals even when the PC isn't supposed to be doing anything. IMO that kind of worthless indexing accelerates drive wear, so I turn those features off. Unfortunately, Windows XP comes with these services turned on by default, and Windows 7 is even worse. It's also become a problem with Nepomuk in the latest versions of KDE.

[Steve A.]

Hmmmm... I've been buying the Green drives ever since they came out. I found that they dropped the ambient temperature in my computer room about 5 to 10 degrees in the summertime! I do use them mainly for archival purposes, but I will make a point of not using them for projects I am actively working on. No problem- I can just copy the source files over to a regular HD and edit them there. Although most of the editing happens in memory-actual and virtual. I do need to make sure that I use normal drives for the temporary files that Adobe Audio uses (the defaults are the drives with the most free space).
I had thought that the Green drives just ran the disk at a slower speed to save energy- I didn't know about the head parking thing. (I thought that heads were parked only when you shut off the drive.)

Steve

[Bruce Johnson]

Thanks for the info, guys. All very interesting. It sounds like the consensus is that I should not worry and just be backed up. I always have all of the data backed up, that's not an issue. I bought this particular computer used for $100 from a private party, so I don't even know how old and worn the hard drive is. It has a bunch of nice software on it, which I wouldn't normally spend the money for, but is nice to have around for occasional use. And I didn't get the disks for it, so if I lose the drive, I lose the software. I suppose I should just buy a new spare drive and do a True Image type mirror copy to keep stored away as a spare.

Using the computer as a shop jukebox is great. I have XM, which I enjoy and usually listen to most of the day. But it's so nice to be able to pop up my own playlists and listen to every track recorded by one band, in shuffle mode, when I get in the mood. I'm too old to have gone through the portable mp3 player phase. CD's are modern technology to me!

[Jazz P Bass]

Recently, I hooked it up to my shop stereo system, and I've been slowly recording old obscure CD's and cassettes onto it as mp3 files.

Yeah but, MP3 files.
Come on.
Record as .wav.
Sounds better.
Yeah, it is a bigger file.

[bob p]

to that, I say "FLAC".

Steve, I'm going to avoid hijacking and answer your comments in the other thread.

[Bruce Johnson]

Yeah but, MP3 files.
Come on.
Record as .wav.
Sounds better.
Yeah, it is a bigger file.

Yeah, I know, but you have to understand the environment. This is an industrial building filled with machinery, and I'm running back and forth between woodworking routers and metal lathes. I enjoy the background music ambience, but the subtle nuances in audio quality between wav files and mp3 files are kind of lost in the general roar!

When I'm copying valuable old stuff, I do record them as wav files for storage, and then make mp3 copies for the shop jukebox computer.

[Steve A.]

When I'm copying valuable old stuff, I do record them as wav files for storage, and then make mp3 copies for the shop jukebox computer.

I do the exact same thing but I record my CD's as FLAC files, which are ~40% smaller than WAV files and- as an added bonus- you can add tags to them with the artist's name and the song and album title. For mission critical rips I use EAC, but otherwise I have been using dBpowerAmp R12 or 13 which runs a *lot* faster. I also use dBpA to convert the FLAC files to LAME V0 MP3's (which give me the most bang per buck).

I like to burn the MP3's to a CD as data files, which can be played on many of the modern CD players. I can usually fit about 10 or 12 average albums on a single CD. For playing MP3's on a computer I always use playlists so that I can hear all of the songs in order.

Steve Ahola

P.S. I have a friend who ripped his entire CD collection to 128kbps MP3 files. And then he ripped them again to 196kbps MP3 files. Some people just never learn. <g> Rip 'em to a lossless format (WAV or FLAC) once and you can convert them to whatever kind of compressed file you might want later.

[InjunRAIV]

Been a computer geek for too many years to count. But your concern about wearing out the hard drives is not reasonably worth worrying about. They are there to serve that purpose, and should run a long time.

But (there is always a but, right?) you have other things to consider. I am assuming your PC is out in that shop, and dust in the air WILL shorten the hard drive's life. And build quality isn't what it used to be either. So the overall answer is you need to assume the drive will fail someday. Murphy suggests also that is will fail at the worst possible time, in the most expensive way.

Daily backups of data are a must. Incremental backups of your music would be handy as well. You can just make MP3 CD/DVDs every so often for that.

Good luck!

[bob p]

Been a computer geek for too many years to count. But your concern about wearing out the hard drives is not reasonably worth worrying about. They are there to serve that purpose, and should run a long time.

But (there is always a but, right?) you have other things to consider. I am assuming your PC is out in that shop, and dust in the air WILL shorten the hard drive's life.

I've always thought that hard disks were manufactured in clean rooms, and that every drive was hermetically sealed to keep environmental dust out, thereby making environmental dust a non-issue to the drive's operation and longevity.

On the subject of wearing out your drives, that is a definite possibility today, in the era of streaming music and video. Drives are being asked to do things today that they never had to do in the past. If, for example, you're attempting to stream video on a badly fragmented drive, that will cause significantly increased wear related to constant seek activity. In that case one should expect that the drive will wear out faster, and that enterprise class drives will last longer than consumer class drives.

Probing the drive's SMART buffers for thermal data might provide interesting answers.