PR4100 - Drive sleep, or 24/7 uptime?

I know this is a heated debate on other forums, but I was thinking I would get feedback from fellow PR4100 users.

A couple years back I started out with an EX4 that had 4 Red drives @ 4tb each for the 16TB total, and about a year ago I upgraded to the PR4100. I have been a ‘power user’ if you will on PCs as I run a small project studio where do a lot of video and audio work.

I have 7 internal drives on my desktop; 3 SSD drives, and 4 standard HDDs (WD black drives). The entire time I had my EX4, and more recently my PR4100, I have NEVER put any of my hard drives into sleep mode - on the NAS unit OR my pc. If the unit they are connected to is powered on, the drives stay awake at all times.

I just upgraded my PR4100 to 4 of the 8TB drives to give me 32Tb total this past weekend, and I updated the firmware for the unit to the latest release (2.31.149 - released on 10/18/2018). After the firmware update, I noticed My PR4100 was going into standby mode where the drives would go to sleep after a certain amount of inactivity. I went into the GUI and it said that sleep mode for the drives was off, but they where still going into sleep mode. I noticed the spin up sounds and latency on my access times earlier this evening, waiting for the drives to spin up.

So I ended up going into the GUI again, turning sleep mode on, then turning it back off and rebooting the PR4100 in hopes it would turn standby mode off properly. So far I believe it has, as I have not accessed any of the data on the unit in about 20 minutes, and it has not re-entered standby mode.

I have ran my EX4 and PR4100 on the other 4 drives 24/7 the last couple years. Never put the system or drives in standby mode, and never shut it down. Occasional reboot here or there if need be for firmware updates. Does anyone else leave their systems up 24/7 with constant up times? Red drives are designed for 24 hour use, correct? I would think that constant spin ups/spin downs/parking would do more damage then leaving them up 24/7?

I’m interested is see what other users have their settings at.

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I’ve got My Cloud, PR2100 and PR4100 and have them on 24/7 for many years now with reboots in between for various reasons, Router Change, Firmware Updates, etc…

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Thanks for the reply/feedback! I’ll be keeping it up and on 24/7 for sure.