Wise to leave drive always running?

I have a WD My Book 3TB external drive, and I plan to use it as storage over my home network. Is it OK to leave it connected 24x7 to a PC (which will also be running 24x7), or should I connect and disconnect as required? I’ve searched the net, and found conflicting anecdotes, so I had to ask this here.

Cheers!

Hello,

It’s optional. Personally, I leave mine connected to the computer all the time. However, I turn my PC off every day. I only disconnect my drive when I’m moving it to a friends house.

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I would say this problem is not solved.

If I were you I would SAFELY REMOVE (aka EJECT) your WD External HD anytime it’s not in use.

If you keep it powered on 24/7 you run into the risk of it failing sooner, because the hardware gets hot and in doing so diminishes the longevity of the drive.

The ideal situation here is to keep your drive alive as many hours / months / years as possible and keep your data.

These drives don’t come with a POWER on/off button for a reason by WD and there is no other conceivable reason that could possibly exist BESIDES WD want’s your drive to burn out sooner so you can buy a NEW one.

Think about it.

By the way, being that this WD drive does not have a power on off button, I strongly suggest you get a program like USB Safely Remove when you want to turn it off. There is a chance if you disconnect the drive when it’s running and the heads remaining on the platters which could potentially cause alighnment issues between the hardware combined with the software that is running it.

When you use USB Safely Remove, it ejects the drive (turns if off) and let’s you know when you can safely remove it.

Basically. If you keep it plugged in 24/7 I think we are looking at a 3 year lifespan as opposed to a potential 10 years lifespan. The hours the drive is plugged in add up, actually they are logged. You can easily see this if you download a program called Hard Disk Sentinel.

Just my opinion.

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I have left my WD backup drive disconnected for a number of days, a number of times.  Each time I have done that, the backup seems to start over again, backing up 100,000’s of files instead of only those changed since the last backup.  I am using file backup.  I am using windows 7.

What can be done to correct this?

Dennis

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