Disk Spin Down & disable_tsr

[Cancunia]

I've implemented diasble_tsr and can confirm that the TSR and live pause no longer work, but the disk still spins while the box is awake. I can understand how that would need to be the case from time to time, for example when booting or perhaps when updating the EPG, but had hoped it would spin down to save power & wear whenever possible.
It looks as if the box is using about 15 watts when awake, any thoughts on how I can minimise the disk usage and encourage a spin down would be much appreciated.

 

[prpr]

Spinning up and down increases wear. Hard disks are more reliable if left spinning. Obviously this uses more power, so you have to decide which is more important.

 

[Ezra Pound]

Spinning up and down increases wear. Hard disks are more reliable if left spinning. Obviously this uses more power, so you have to decide which is more important.

I think there is growing evidence that you maybe correct, HERE (#4 and #5) is a HDD that has run for 12302 hours but with only 442 start / stop cycles, It has no indication of problems at all

 

[Cancunia]

Yep, I can be believe the reliability would be better if the disk was kept spinning, servers normally keep disks spinning for reasons of reliability and access speed, a lot of hardware failures also come from power cycles. Having said that all modern disk drives and pc power management packages have disk spin down as an option, and I've yet to have a disk fail on spin up. My HDR has been running now for most of the day at 20 Watts, less than the Sky HD Box on standby if I recall correctly.
Would be nice if I could get it to spin down, no different really than putting it in standby of course, other than the fact that I then can't access remotely.....