Hibernate your NAS HDD or not?

[BobW]

Hi,
What is the general consensus here, is it better to use hibernation or not?
I have heard two conflicting opinions. One says that hibernation actually causes more / faster mechanical wear/tear on the hard drives because they have to start spinning again from idle, while the other says keeping the hard drives spinning all the time will cause more wear and tear.
What do you guys here think about these two points of view?

 

[Rusty]

What do you guys here think about these two points of view?

Personal point, never used hibernation on any model since 2008. Saying that, one model from 2011, 2012 still work today including some of the drives. Also, considering the number of services that break hibernation, I think there is a limiting number of scenarios that allow for hibernation to actually work.

 

[fredbert]

Not sure why you think you’ll get any more of a consensus here than you’ve already found elsewhere

With Synology NAS you may not have a choice to use hibernation… well you may choose to enable the setting but it is ignored due to running some of the features/packages that stop hibernation. This is my situation.

For my oldest, DS215j, it languishes as a Mac Time Machine destination. The Macs are set to do a TM backup one a day, so I do have hibernation on and suspect it is working. The operating power is around the level of two LED light bulbs so generally too little to overly worry about.

 

[EAZ1964]

There has never been any evidence that hibernation, or even powering off HDD caused higher failure. ( this will be challenged, but I really tried to find it. Other than 25y old rumours on forums there is nothing to find).

There is hard evidence that powering off devices saves electricity.

So for me a clear answer: power it off or hibernate as often as you can

 

[Jan Janowski]

Seeing that cameras send pics to NAS randomly based on motion, and receiving NAS sends that elsewhere, no, not using hibernation.

Also have timed scripts running nightly on NAS receiving pics to control pix age and directory size, that’s been running upwards of 5 years without maintenance by me… whose results are copied to other NAS’s.