"Wear down your hard drive?" "Plastic Bearing Races?" Pish Posh, at least for Seagate.
My computers are ALWAYS on 24/7. Every single one of them. And I don't even let them power down during inactivity anymore. My rate of hard drive failure compared to those of my clients (none of whom leave them on 24/7) is is *much better*. Yes, this is anecdotal and therefore not terribly useful, but this "count on a failure every two years" statement does not jive with my experiences.
Furthermore, modern fluid bearing don't have the same wear characteristics as the old physical bearings. There aren't traditional races to wear down any more.
New seagate drives have a 5 year warranty with a 600,000 power-on hour mean time between failure rating., which is 68 years. Obviously, this is a logrithmic failure scale and they think that an acceptable X% failure rate happens at 600,000 on their curve, and therefore individual experiences vary and this figure isn't meant to be gospel, PLUS I don't know about other manufacturers these days, but I will expect at least 5 years of use from these drives as a reult.
And finally, in my (counts fingers and toes) 15 years computer consulting experience, the biggest killers of hard drives are: 1) heat, 2) irregular power, either from a failing power supply, or from building-supplied power that is iffy. Using an uninturruptable power supply to clean your electricity is the #1 way to keep your hard drive (and indeed, the whole PC) happy over the long haul.
So anyway, here's a note from someone who has no fear keeping those drives humming 24/7.
-Llama
