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[sevenlayermuddle]

spin down on idle can actually make things worse as the power up/down process is the most stressful event a hdd has.

Agreed, that's why I specified 'after a few hours idle'.   By the nature of the way I use the server, once a disk is spun down, it tends to stay spun down for at least a day, or even several days.   Hard to see how that can be too harmful, especially as my discs all died of bad sectors, not spindle motor or electronic failure. 

Quite apart from wear and tear on the drive, the unwanted energy dissipation from a spinning disc is about 10W.  Even when you allow for winter savings in gas CH usage I reckon my spin down strategy still saves around £5-10 per disk per year.

[Chrysalis]

yeah fair enough.

When I got my WD green 2TB I used a tool to increase its idle timeout as by default its ridiculously low.

[roseway]

Years ago I had a disk which had auto spin-down built into its design, and it was intensely irritating as it happened after only a couple of minutes. I wrote a little program which ran in the background and poked the disk once a minute to keep it alive, and saved my sanity.

[Ixel]

In my experiences with having hard drives in both server and workstation computers, I've noted particular brands which seem to always fail quicker than most of the known brands out there.

Maxtor/Seagate, OCZ (SSD)

I've had some brand new Maxtor/Seagates also appear to be DOA. I've vowed never to buy another Seagate/Maxtor or OCZ storage device again (HDD or SSD that is). I stick to Western Digital and Samsung (SSD) for the most part these days, never had an issue since - even with having run some WD HDD's well over six years (I must consider replacing these before they begin to fail due to age).