I have a Drobo 5D. It runs great and no issues so far after about 6 weeks.
I have wondered about the disks constantly being powered for long periods.
There is about 16 hours a day that its not in use and of the other 8 it may get used each night for short periods. There are days I may not even use it during those 8 hours, or on weekends I might use it all day. It does vary. I use if for fusion vms, my itunes library and large file storage. There are times I don’t need those items when using the Mac when I am just surfing the web or running some software.
Sometimes I just let it sleep but I can always hear a fan or something spinning, but the disks appear to sleep after a while. When I run the Mac and not really using the array, the drives sleep but they wake up every now and then and I hear each drive spin up often. I realize this is likely normal behavior, but it does make me think about best practices.
I wonder about unnecessary wear and tear, and where the fine line between powering off the array and leaving it on comes into question. This got me to often times powering the array off properly from the dashboard. I work in IT and have seen drives spin for years at a time without issues, but these are 24x7 environments that need them to spin and there is a budget (or warranty) for replacing drives in place and doesn’t come out of my paycheck.
so what are the thoughts on keeping powered on, sleeping and turning off when it comes to wear and tear on the equipment and pocket book?