Net searches about how long an HDD lasts are about as informative as the length of a piece of string. General opinion seems to be that 5 years is about the maximum life that can be expected from an HDD but that is based on 24/7 use and might not applly to HDDs used for music files in Roon.
And BTW, not using an NAS setup, I do have external backups of the 3 8TB Seagate drives full of music files. And I regularly check the drives with CrystalDiskinfo to detect any possible problems. I’ve had Roon for over 7 years now but the HDDs used have changed as the library grew so I’ve not had anything used for Roon continously except for one 8TB HDD with 40,000 hours registered - to be safe it is about to relegated to backup status.
I leave this PC with its 7 internal drives on 24/7 but that does not nercessarily mean the 3 drives with music files for Roon are always active. But then does the stop/start when Roon is used affect their life? So the proof of the pudding is in the eating - how long have drives lasted in your experience and do you favour any particular brand of capacity? How often have you found it good process to replace drives?
The internal 2 tb HDD in my streamer, a Salkstream III, houses Roon and my local library. I leave the Salkstream on 24/7 except when gone on vacation. It only gets used a few times a week, maybe 10 hours a week; I’m not a heavy user. The drive failed after about 4.5 years.
I’m hoping the current drive, about 3.5 years old, will last much longer. I’ve certainly had drives last much longer in computers.
Another part of our business (not affiliated with the above report) deals with failed drives literally every day. I can only say that from an individual perspective, this entirely depends on your luck. The best you can do is to pick a brand that is not having an abnormally high failure rate from 3rd party reports like the above.
I won’t, unless you see a bad sector with a drive.
Disks normally are designed for a target system. Desktop or server/NAS. These server disks are designed to run 24/7, handle vibrations differently and have a much higher MTBF (mean time between failure).
You do get 24/7 models for classical spinners and for SSD.
I am very happy with WDC Red and Seagate IronWolf as classical disks and Samsung PM893 as SSD.
Normally I calculate on 20 disks one broken disk per year.
Maybe not the start/stop cycle as you are referring to it, but I’ve experienced occurrences where disks that had been running 24/7 for years where stopped for server maintenance and failed on startup. Potentially this was cause by the disk cooling down, but who knows.
But I also have a personal NAS that was running 24/7 between 2013 and 2021 before being taken offline. A few weeks ago, I started it up again and all (8) WD Red 3TB disks worked without issue.
